During beef carcass chilling, the eating quality of meat can be severely affected by either hot- or cold-shortening. With basis on previous knowledge that meat of optimal tenderness can be produced when rigor mortis (pH=6.0) is attained when carcass temperature falls between 12-35°C, the objective of this study was to predict meat quality from modelled pH/temperature decay descriptors and informative animal/carcass characteristics. Temperature and pH from a total of 103 beef carcasses were logged during 24 h post mortem, and subsequently modelled by exponential decay equations that estimated temperature (kT) and pH (kpH) decay rates. In addition, a number of pH/temperature decay descriptors were estimated from the fitted models. From linear models adjusted to each of these descriptors, it was found that, generally, hot carcass weight, age, gender and class (male, female, young animals) had significant influence on pH/temperature decay. Thus, bringing together the orthogonal variables kT and kpH, and the aforementioned animal/carcass characteristics as linear predictors of discriminant functions, a classification analysis was performed. While cold-shortened and hot-shortened carcasses were classified correctly for all samples, optimal quality carcasses were correctly classified in 87.5% of the samples.