This website uses cookies primarily for visitor analytics. Certain pages will ask you to fill in contact details to receive additional information. On these pages you have the option of having the site log your details for future visits. Indicating you want the site to remember your details will place a cookie on your device. To view our full cookie policy, please click here. You can also view it at any time by going to our Contact Us page.

Close

Assessing Covid-caused hygiene practices

12 September 2021

Campden BRI is looking for partners to help with new research that aims to assess the impact of Covid-19 on factory hygiene to help businesses develop more efficient procedures. It could save participating manufacturers significant cost and time as the research reveals which cleaning interventions have been the most successful. 

The research aims to compare factory swab results from hundreds of different businesses to identify patterns in microbiological data to improve hygiene practices to produce safer products.

Commenting on the project, Dr Greg Jones, senior microbiologist at Campden BRI, said: “When the pandemic hit the food industry hard last year, manufacturers found little to no guidance available on how to handle such an unexpected scenario. As a result, feedback from industry groups suggested that food businesses implemented different hygiene strategies to continue to produce safe products while maintaining staff safety.

“This inadvertently set the scene for the single greatest industry-wide experiment into factory hygiene. For the first time, we can use the factory swab data generated from hundreds of food factories to compare the impact of different hygiene approaches on factory microflora. We could draw countless conclusions from this data, but what we are most excited about identifying is the effectiveness of specific approaches on specific food pathogens.”

The researchers will analyse the microbiological data  and compare it with survey responses to identify any patterns or correlations that could help build more efficient and targeted hygiene procedures.

Specifically, the research will look at two sets of microbiological data – namely Listeria and total viable counts (TVCs) – and will draw conclusions from this data. For example, comparing data generated pre- and post-pandemic from a number of factories might reveal a particular cleaning method that is effective against a food pathogen such as Listeria monocytogenes.

Another example comes from the approaches adopted to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Many food businesses put in place barriers, yet it is to be determined whether this had an impact on a factory’s microflora by, for example, making it more difficult to clean certain areas.

The research will also examine how different hygiene approaches compare. Research begins in October and will initially run for a year. 


Contact Details and Archive...

Print this page | E-mail this page