A nordic collaborative study in assessment of surface hygiene using swabbing, contact plates and dipslides

Microbiological hygiene in food production and processing aims to protect the consumer from pathogenic agents and assure food quality [7, 16, 19]. Techniques and practices in the food industry have been evolved to aid in this process through formal quality control systems to meet international or company standards in response to the need for total quality management systems or customer demands [5-8, 18]. Good hygiene practice is very important in meeting these obligations at an affordable cost, without compromising safety, quality or service to the customer [4, 9, 17]. Hygiene monitoring in industrial premises is currently based on conventional cultivation using swabbing or contact plates. There is a need for validation of practical methods to study surface hygiene in industrial premises [20]. The purpose of this Nordic collaborative study was to evaluate the reliability of the swabbing and contact plate methods on microbially soiled surfaces in terms of repeatability and reproducibility [10- 14].