9fbtechreview.comOCTOBER 2023the factory is critical to understand the source of a contamination. The same principle can be applied to spoilage microorganisms; identifying not only the species but the strain that has caused spoilage of a beverage it is a fundamental part of the investigation, and will help to trace back the contamination, whether it comes from materials, personnel, processing line or the factory environment.Industry has made little progress in setting more accurate specifications. While for pathogenic microbes, specs remain to be presence/absence with little understanding on the virulence of the different strains, for spoilage microorganisms specs only consider total counts, with very little knowledge on what are the specific species that have the capability to alter product properties. 100 colony forming units of yeast in 100ml of a beverage might not be able of spoiling a product, while fewer cells of a different species can easily spoil the product. The F&B industry craves better understanding of the microbial risks on the E2E supply chain to minimize the quality and food safety incidents, but there are several challenges to modernize microbiology and for a massive uptake of molecular methods. Let's mention some of these challenges:People Capability:Adopting modern molecular techniques requires skilled personnel. Microbiology scientific background and specific training is needed for many of the molecular methods, while for traditional methods many companies have given the responsibility to non-microbiologists.Capital Investment:Laboratory layout and infrastructure: Stricter GLPs are required for a lab to be capable of doing molecular methods. Adapting existing labs to implement molecular methods can require a high investment and sometimes even more physical space; to have separate rooms for the molecular lab.Specialized equipment that is not present in the microbiology labs doing traditional microbiology.Approval:Before any new method can be widely adopted, they must first be validated and approved. Approval process for molecular methods requires additional considerations.Operational Costs:While testing one sample using traditional methods can cost from less than one US dollar to maximum four dollars, microbiology methods can range from seven dollars and some even more than 20 dollars. When you start doing the math, the pushback becomes obvious; for many companies although desiring to have a better microbiological risk management; it is just simply not possible to move from petri dishes into any molecular techniques. High investment combined with higher operating costs plus the need of more skilled resources has not outweighed the benefits.Affordability does not solve all the barriers but reduces the threshold enabling companies to focus their time to raise personnel and laboratories capabilities.Food safety is a must, but it is not enough, we must ensure our product always deliver the quality that our consumers expect, advancing on the methods that we used will help us to deliver the promise to our consumers. Combined efforts of the industry and suppliers are required to deliver simple and affordable microbiology methods that can be used in a routine basis at every manufacturing site
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