At month 0, a multivariate step-wise linear discriminant analysis was carried out to determine whether the fresh crab sticks and those frozen by different methods can be distinguished and, in this case, which quality attributes are the best to explain the differences among them.
To test the main effects of the freezing conditions and the storage time on the quality attributes of the thawed crab sticks, a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on the data by using the General Linear Model procedure of the statistical software. The significance level was set at 5%. A Tukey-b test was applied for post-hoc comparisons.