Identifying Meat from Grazing or Feedlot Yaks Using Visible and Near-infrared Spectroscopy with Chemometrics

•The feasibility of classification of husbandry pattern of yak meat is investigated by visible and near-infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics.•Meat from grazing or feedlot yaks were captured as unique fingerprints by Vis-NIR spectroscopy.•The partial least squares discriminant analysis performed better than the soft independent modeling of class analogies.•PLS-DA modeling in 400–2500 nm verified the feeding pattern of yak meat with the accuracy of 100%.