Food Division Microbiology

Environmental/Food Factory Hygiene Monitoring

Food Factory Environmental Hygiene is an essential part of food production and it forms part of HACCAP, due diligence,and is inspected by regulatory and customer auditors.

Swabbing - Surface Hygiene

ILS can help with food factory hygiene by testing swabs which are used to monitor the effectiveness of the food factory cleaning program. It also is often used to validate critical control points highlighted through HACCP.

Testing would normally include Total Viable Count and Enterobacteriaceae but other organisms are also routinely tested for depending on your personal requirements.

Swabbing - Hand Hygiene

Swabbing can also be used to monitor hand hygiene which with hand washing awareness is part of food factory hygiene. Testing would normally include Staphylococcus aureus and Enterobacteriaceae

Listeria Swabbing

Testing for Listeria is part of quality assurance throughout food manufacture and is monitored by the factory quality control department, part of the monitoring is swabbing.

Having a good Listeria Environmental Swabbing program is an important part of Listeria control in your food manufacturing environment as Listeria is often a post process contaminant.

Air Monitoring

Air plates containing relevant media can be supplied to expose in the factory to monitor bacteria, moulds and yeasts. At ILS we produce all of our own media and can supply various different types of agar plates for monitoring air quality.

ILS can also offer advice on how to set up food factory environmental control and monitoring plans to help meet the specifications required for good food factory environmental hygiene.

ILS will test the swabs or incubate the air plates and send your results via the ILS results systems.

Contact ILS - for advice on hygiene and environmental swabbing testing and prices.