Better food safety practices

The fi ght against foodborne illness is a fi ght against probability. The US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that each year one in six Americans (approximately 48 million) are affected by foodborne illnesses and there are 3000 deaths due to the consumption of tainted food products (CDC 2011 ). Recent incidences of foodborne outbreaks, including the most recent Listeriosis outbreak linked with prepackaged caramel apples during 2014 Christmas holidays (Fig. 1 ), further confi rm the need to detect and identify the often nonconventional sources of contamination as early as possible. Moreover, the pressure is higher than ever for food manufactures to ensure the safety of food supplies throughout ingredient acquisition, handling, processing, packaging, storage, and distribution. Globally, food safety management continues to move toward “systematic management commitment,” as can be seen both in the US Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) as well as the Global Food Safety Initiatives (GFSI) schemes such as Safe Quality Food (SQF), BRC, ISO, etc. The role of effective microbial testing becomes much more critical to the food processing industry. To date, the majority of smallto mediumsized food processing companies does not have the capability to conduct microbial screening in house. Rather, they rely solely on sending their samples out to commercial testing laboratories, which often give a 4–7 day turnaround time. Not only does such a holding time delay the release of the products to the market, which inevitably shortens the shelf life of the products, but it also requires the processors to allot extra space and pay for extra electricity to store the products on site. Additionally, sending packaged samples to external laboratories for microbial testing also eliminates the opportunity for the food processor to catch where and how the contamination might have occurred, rendering the products susceptible to recurring problems. Therefore, there is a direct need for the food processing industry to establish onsite microbial screening using tools that are reliable, robust, easy to operate, and costeffective. Equally, noteworthy is that the food processors need to choose microbial screening protocols and/or instruments that received approval by professional standardsetting organizations such as the AOAC International. Conventionally, testing every single batch of products is considered costprohibitive. With the onsite screening capacity, instead of testing the selected samples of the fi nished products, more products could be screened in house. Various ingredients, intermittent premixes or semifi nished products could also be easily tested for their microbial load before they are employed or processed further. Samples that are tested positive for foodborne pathogens using the inhouse screening tool can then be sent out to fullblown microbial laboratories for confi rmation or even to conduct challenge studies. It is widely recognized by the food processing industry that “representative sampling” remains the greatest challenge in managing food safety. The use of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) swap as a sanitation/hygiene indicator has been a widely adopted practice in the food industry ’ s standard sanitation operation procedures (SSOP); however, there remain considerable discrepancies between ATP readings and microbial growth (Wiederoder et al. 2013 ). For instance, an unclean surface of processing equipment could easily become a reservoir that fosters growth of pathogenic microorganisms. How can the sanitation EDITORIAL