Quality control

Reliable quality assurance of commercial cultures is not trivial. Detecting low levels of unwanted microorganisms including pathogens in a culture preparation with extremely high bacterial content requires specific expertise to avoid false negative results. Furthermore, determining the correct concentration of the culture itself is crucial for a sound business, and requires a precision which it normally not provided by standard cell counts.

At ISI Food Protection, we offer customised hygiene and safety assurance programmes by dedicated protocols for cultures, using ISO or NMKL-accredited methods for all our analyses. Our ISO 17025 accreditation covers a wide range of microbiological parameters. Classical reference methods and equivalent rapid methods are available for the common pathogens.

We offer quality control of culture functionality by customised tests of e.g., fermentation activity, bacteriocin production or other antimicrobial activity. Strain identity is determined by a6S/26S rRNA sequencing, genotyping or whole genome sequencing, as relevant.