Sanitary Survey Sampling
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Leveraging Sanitary Survey Sampling for In-Process Quality Control

ByRuth Petran

In a typical food plant, appropriate preventive controls are implemented to address the inevitable hazards from a variety of sources to ensure that the resulting products are safe.  As part of these programs, we traditionally think of sampling ingredients or finished products to help verify the effectiveness and thorough implementation of these controls. Many food companies…

Sterile VS Aseptic
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Sterile or Aseptic? Understanding the Difference

ByClarence Johnson

Ensuring the quality and safety of dairy and food products is the number one priority of processors, explaining why questions surrounding sterile or aseptic frequently enter into the conversation, especially when discussing equipment cleanliness and sampling or testing techniques. While the words sterile and aseptic are often used interchangeably, they are not, in fact, interchangeable….

Economics of Quality Assurance in Dairy Processing
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Economics of Quality Assurance in Dairy Processing

ByClarence Johnson

A cost-benefit analysis of a well-conceived and carefully sustained quality assurance program for dairy processing is hard to pin down. Every month, the costs associated with maintaining quality assurance jump off the profit and loss statement, but the benefits are much harder to decipher. Still, when evaluating the economics of quality assurance over the long…

Blog Importance of Hazard Analysis
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Importance of Hazard Analysis to Ensure Food Safety with Emerging Food Trends

ByRuth Petran

The food market has transformed significantly in recent years, from the year-round availability of fresh produce to emerging niche products like cell-grown meats to online food ordering and delivery services. Consumers have not only created a demand for alternative food options but have been able to directly engage with food manufacturers, which makes the importance…

Preventing Post-Process Contamination
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Preventing Post-Process Contamination: Don’t Lose Sight of the Basics

ByRuth Petran

With the World Health Organization estimating that one in ten people get sick and more than 400,000 die from foodborne illnesses each year, a public health focus aimed at decreasing this incidence is needed.  The primary goal of the management of risks associated with food is to protect public health by controlling them as effectively…

Effective Micro Program
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Effective Micro Program: Understanding the Microbiological Tests (Part 4)

ByNeil Bogart

Throughout this series on dairy microbiological testing, we have discussed the types of micro tests that can be used to enumerate the classifications of bacteria we are concerned with in fluid milk processing. The first two articles discussed Gram-negative bacteria in raw milk and the effects of Gram-positive heat resistant thermoduric/psychrotrophic spore formers (HRSF) on…

Micro Testing for Post-pasteurization Contamination
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Micro Testing for Post-pasteurization Contamination (Part 3)

ByNeil Bogart

The first article in this series, Raw Milk Dairy Micro Testing, focused on Gram-negative bacteria in raw milk with the Preliminary Incubation (PI) Count and Fresh Standard Plate Count (SPC) tests. The second article, The Effects of Gram-positive HRSF Bacteria on Fluid Milk Shelf Life, discussed another classification of bacteria that was not known as…

Why is Aseptic Inline Sampling Critical to Process Monitoring?
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Why is Aseptic Inline Sampling Critical to Process Monitoring? 

ByMara Herschbach

The significant food safety recalls that have occurred in the dairy processing industry this past year, ranging from Listeria outbreaks in ice cream to Cronobacter in infant formula, and the Food and Drug Administration’s* (FDA)’s recent publication of its revised Investigations Operations Manual draw attention to the criticality of inline process monitoring of bacterial risks,…

Membrane Filtration Sampling Blog
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Membrane Filtration Sampling

ByChris Pundmann

Membrane filtration is a widely used process in the dairy industry that separates specific components of milk and whey and then either concentrates or removes/reduces them. The technology used in cheese-making, whey protein concentration, fractionation of protein, and numerous other dairy processes requires special sampling considerations for both regulatory purposes and component analysis. It is…