An experiment was conducted to evaluate the ability of two spectroscopy methods to distinguish between pasture and preserved-forage cheeses. The reflectance spectra of 308 fresh and freeze-dried samples of cow's milk cheeses were recorded at wavelengths in the range of the visible, using a portable MINOLTA CM-2002 spectrophotometer. The reflectance spectra of the same samples were also measured in near infrared range using a non-portable laboratory monochromator NIRSystem 6500. The proportion of cheeses correctly classified by NIRS and visible spectra was respectively 0.96 and 0.91 for pasture samples, and 0.96 and 0.79 for preserved-forage samples. No significant differences were found when fresh and freeze-dried cheeses were compared. We conclude that NIRS is able to classify cheese samples from different regimes (here, pasture vs. preserved-forage). (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.