Hygiene Monitoring - Contact Plates

Contact Plates for Rapid Enumeration of Bacteria

Microorganism are found everywhere, in the air, in water on your body, in your body. Many of these are actually useful but when they occur in food processing they tend to destroy the food to reduce its shelf life. This excludes the useful bacteria in fermented food and probiotic cultures. They grow during food processing and in the environment like floor and walls next to the food processing equipment. To control these to a manageable quantity, they need to be quantified. This is especially needed for factories where dry cleaning is employed. HACCP has mandated environmental test as well as cleaning validation for processing equipment cleaned.

Quantification can be done by swabbing the surfaces and streaking it on a culture agar. But these require a microbiologist and a proper lab. For simplicity prepared contact plates with ready-made agar like RIDA STAMP or a reconstituted plate like MC Media. The microbiological agars of the “RIDA STAMP” product line is perfectly suited for direct stamps of surfaces in the production environment and therefore useable as control tests. RIDA STAMP plates can be applied also on solid foods to make microbial loads on food surfaces visible.