Qualidade da carne comum versus a carne premium e percepção dos consumidores

Abstract

Consumers are the final link in the beef production chain, therefore understanding them, knowing their consumption habits and preferences is essential, both to meet their requirements and offer a product that satisfies them, as well as to guide producers, industries, and companies, so that they can produce a quality product that meets the demand. Meat quality has an impact on the purchasing decision of consumers who are more demanding, as characteristics such as color, amount of fat, flavor, tenderness, and juiciness are much sought after by them. However, most of the beef produced in Brazil still does not meet the demand for quality required by market niches, so that producers have already sought to increase their efficiency and productive quality. In this sense, as there are genetic differences in the attributes that confer quality to beef, it is necessary to use genetic information for the selection of superior animals for the desired characteristics. In view of this, the objective of this work was to evaluate the perception of consumers about the quality of common, premium, and super premium meat, their willingness to pay more for a higher quality product, and to evaluate the quality of these three types of meat through physical-chemical analyses. As well as estimating genetic and phenotypic correlations to assist genetic improvement programs in the selection of animals to produce super premium meat. Consumers were able to detect differences in the quality of super premium meat in relation to the others and classified it as the best meat, however they did not notice differences between common and premium meat. Those who had more education were more willing to pay more for a quality product. The physical chemical analyzes were fundamental in determining the quality of the meat classes, so that the quality characteristics of the super premium meat were significantly better than the others for EGS, FC, and EE. It was observed that the genetic correlations of marbling measurements are highly associated with the amount of intramuscular fat, so its selection will lead to an increase in this characteristic.