Microbiological Guidelines

Food plays an essential part in everyday life.

Food should be tasty, healthy, sustainable and preferably not too expensive.
But food should also be safe and with sufficient guarantees on maintaining
good quality aspects until the end of shelf life. The various actors in the
food supply chain have an interest in verifying the expected quality and
safety by means of microbiological analyses of food. Measurement brings
knowledge and microbiological guidelines help in the decision-making process
for judging the acceptability of food or food production processes.
The present handbook provides microbiological guidelines and current
applicable EU legal criteria (status 1.1.2018) for a wide range of food
categories (dairy, meat, seafoods, plant-based foods, bakery products,
composite foods, shelf-stable food, water) and subcategories therein, based
upon the type of food processing and intrinsic characteristics of the foods.
This book can be consulted to provide quick answers on the expected
microbiological contamination of foodstuff. It can help in interpretation of
test results in assessing good (hygienic) practices in the production of food,
determining the shelf life and ensuring food safety. The handbook also
presents definitions of the wide variety of foodstuffs available and some
reflections on, in particular, food safety issues or the on-going debate for
some food items in assessing microbial quality.

This book provides crucial information about food safety, for the use of
students and professionals.

EXTRACT

"First we eat, then we do everything else"
M.F.K. Fisher

Food plays an important part in everyday life. But when being a food scientist
or in the food business, food gets to be an even bigger part of your life. Our
team at the Food Microbiology and Food Preservation research group (FMFP-
UGent) at Ghent University during its academic tasks in education, research,
scientific activities at committees, but also in interaction with many food
companies and stakeholders in the food supply chain in projects or contract
work, has built up considerable expertise on the microbiological analysis of a
large variety of foodstuffs. Being situated in Ghent, and thus close to
Brussels, the heart of Europe, we intrinsically have to understand and deal
with legal EU criteria or action limits. The latter is the reason why this
book is mainly oriented towards inclusion or making reference to EU legal
microbiological criteria for foodstuffs as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

The main author, Prof. Mieke Uyttendaele, leads, together with Prof. Frank
Devlieghere, the Food Microbiology and Food Preservation Research Group (FMFP-
UGent) at Ghent University, Belgium. Her teaching and research area covers
aspects of microbiological analysis of foods, food safety and food hygiene.
She has built over twenty years of experience by executing, initiating and
coordinating various projects in this research discipline dealing with
sampling and testing to collect baseline data on the microbial contamination
of foods, looking into the virulence of food-borne pathogens, elaborating
challenge testing to study the behavior of food-borne pathogens. All this
information serves as an input for quality assurance and microbial risk
assessment to support food safety decision-making and setting microbiological
criteria. She was/is the promotor of more than 25 Ph.D students (including EU
and non-EU citizens).
Throughout her career, Prof. Uyttendaele has published more than 270 peer
reviewed scientific papers, authored several book chapters and presented at
numerous international Conferences/Workshops. Throughout the years she has
also used her scientific expertise in interpretation of test results for
analyses obtained in routine monitoring or analysis executed at the food
service lab at FMFP-UGent.