Hygiene Monitoring

Swab and Surface Test

Monitoring your facility’s environment can help to gauge the effectiveness of your cleaning and biosecurity practices. In food and pharmaceutical industry, swab test is often used to validate critical control points highlighted through HACCP. Environmental hygiene is an essential part of a production and it forms part of HACCP, due diligence, and is inspected by the regulatory authority and auditors. It is essential that you carry out regular swab tests, either quarterly, half yearly or yearly surface check of your manufacturing facility.

A wide variety of compounds can be tested for microbiological contaminants. If you are evaluating spraying and wanting to monitor the cleaning processes, we’ll have a swab and surface test to meet your requirements.

Critical Control Point is the point where an identified hazard can be monitored, prevented or eliminated. These areas include, but are not limited to:

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  • All types of production equipment (conveyors, blenders, cutting blades), utensils (spoons, tools) and containers (bins, packaging materials) that have direct contact with food product.
  • Indirect food contact surfaces which can be found in the plant environment include drains, water footbath, walls, doors handles and utility pipes are also sources of contamination and should be monitored periodically.
  • Processing plant personnel is also a potential contamination source in the food processing facility in many respects.

Therefore, most food and pharmaceutical facilities will customize their own environmental sampling schedule as a means to meet HACCP prerequisites and/or to validate their day-day pre-operational cleaning sanitation.

Test Parameters:

  • Sanitation verification: Total Plate Count
  • Spoilage or indicator verification: Yeast & Mould, Coliform, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacteriaceae, Staphylococcus aureus and etc.

Reference Methods:

  • APHA Compendium – Compendium of Methods for the Microbiological Examination of Foods
  • FDA-BAM- U.S Food & Drug Administration Bacteriological Analytical Manual

Air Quality

Microbiological air quality is critical in pharmaceutical sectors, where maintaining sterility is the aim, but controlling the levels of microbial contamination in air has also become an increasingly important part of hygienic food manufacturing in recent years.

The atmosphere in food factories may not be the first concern as a source of microbial contamination, but in most cases some of the airborne microorganisms cause product spoilage, or foodborne pathogens. Some types of bacterial and fungal spores survive remarkably well in the atmosphere. Therefore, it makes good sense for industry to monitor the airborne microbes using a HACCP approach. Once an acceptable contamination levels has been established, monitoring airborne contamination regularly is a useful means of identifying problems before they affect product quality and safety.

Test Parameters:

  1. Passive Air Monitoring
    • Typically employs ‘settle plates’
    • Ideal for providing an early warning of problems in environments such as low risk food industry
    • Various types of media to cover total plate count, coliform, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, etc.
  2. Active Air Monitoring
    1. Where air quality must meet regulatory guidelines, we can offer Air Sampler method
    2. Sampling of a specific volume of air in a defined time is performed with a machine-MAS-100. Air is drawn using the calibrated air sampling equipment to ensure the accuracy of results
    3. This method is recommended for clean rooms and other controlled environments where sampling large volumes of air is required
    4. Various types of media to cover total plate count, coliform, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, etc.

Reference Methods:

  • APHA Compendium – Compendium of Methods for the Microbiological Examination of Foods
  • FDA-BAM- U.S Food & Drug Administration Bacteriological Analytical Manual