Hello, this is PMA Public Relations Director Julia Stewart. The association is pleased to introduce a new series of briefings on new series of briefings on food safety, science and innovation featuring PMA Chief Science Officer Dr. Robert Whitaker — welcome to our first installment.

Bob, many of our members are following the salmonella saintpaul illness outbreak that has been linked to certain types of tomatoes. One member has asked us …

What role can microbial testing play, and can it ensure our products are safer?

Dr. Bob Whitaker:

The simple answer to this question is that you can never test your way into food safety Testing is merely a tool, and an imperfect one at that. The best way to make sure your products are as safe as they can be is to have a documented food safety program in place to govern your operations – one that is driven by a comprehensive risk assessment that looks at all the potential contaminations that could take place. The absolute best way to avoid an illness associated with your products is to prevent the contamination from ever occurring.

Some in our industry mistakenly think a food safety program is the documentation you use to pass food safety audits. In fact, a food safety program is a risk assessment/risk management program — and the documentation is simply the verification that you are indeed managing the risks to the best of your ability. Then once you have a sound, risk-based food safety program in place, microbial testing may be used to help validate certain aspects of that program.

Water testing is one of these areas where microbial testing can be used as a validation tool. Incoming water should be tested on at least a monthly basis. But even before testing, first consider what risks does your water source pose? Obviously a municipal water source or a deep well poses much lower risks than an open water source like a canal, reservoir or river. In any event, you would want to put management procedures in place to manage the risk of contamination. Once that is done, microbial testing is a way to monitor the effectiveness of the risk management procedures. Often, testing for specific pathogens is not necessary, but perhaps a simple test for generic E. coli as an indicator for fecal contamination would suffice, and would be more cost effective. In the end, there is no perfect organism to test for and the operator or food safety professional will have to make their own decision on whether to test for specific pathogens or not. For example, if your risk assessment indicates that there is a potential for Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7 contamination because the water source is in proximity to a potential contamination source – for example, dairy, poultry, bird nesting areas, et cetera — then pathogen testing would be advisable.

Microbial testing can also be an excellent way to test for the efficacy of equipment and facility sanitation methods. Often a quick swab test for total plate count is sufficient for this purpose. There are also several “do it yourself”, ATP-based test kits available that have the advantage of lower cost and time savings that would fit this bill.

And finally, product testing has become a hot topic in our industry. It certainly seems like a logical thing to do until you look at it further. I’ll cover that question tomorrow. See you then!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Food Safety, Microbial Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.