Evaluation of sanitation procedures for use in dairies

The research work for project P96049 in the second NORDFOOD programme was mainly carried out at VTT Biotechnology, Matforsk and SIK together with representatives from the Nordic dairies Valio Ltd., Arla and TINE as well as the technochemical company Suomen Unilever Oy DiverseyLever. The senior advisors at Nordic Industrial Fund involved in the project were Maija Uusisuo and Oddur Gunnarsson. The experiments carried out in the project focused on monitoring methods in sanitation of open and closed systems e.g. fogging, ozonation, footbath hygiene, cleaning of cheese moulds and yoghurt pasteurizers, development of testing procedures for measuring disinfectant efficacy, microbial resistance phenomena against disinfectants, life-cycle assessment and an evaluation procedure for the functionality of the cleaning procedures. New procedures in hygiene have been implemented in dairies based on the results. Development of detection and identification methods for assessing microbial contaminants on or in process equipment, raw material, process air, packaging material and final products is continued in the Nordic dairy hygiene network project DairyNET - Hygiene control in dairy environment, which has partners from all Nordic countries and which is partly funded by the Nordic Industrial Fund (P00027). The contacts between industrial personnel and researchers dealing with hygiene questions in the Nordic countries, which have been built up in the 2 previous NordFood programmes (1994-2000), are thus continued.