T E S T I N G
LABORATORY CHOICES
The demand for high quality and reliable microbiological and chemical
laboratory services is high, yet all labs are not the same. How do you determine
which lab is best for your business?
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Accreditation
Ask prospective laboratories if they are
accredited to national and international standards.
Check out the websites of accreditation bodies,
which are also useful to search for specific
status and scope. ISO accreditation is one
way businesses provide assurance to other
businesses (and reassure themselves) that
they are operating in accordance with a globally
recognised standard, are competent and reliable.
But accreditation does not guarantee that all
entities accredited under the same standard are
equal.
Recommendations
If you want to know details about the day-today
realities of working with a food lab, talk to
your peers. If a lab is involved in shady practices
or is difficult to work with, chances are word
will get around. If someone says a particular
lab is cheap and gets results out quickly, it’s
worth considering why. Ask your contact some
personal questions, such as why/how/when they
started working with the lab, and why they prefer
them over other labs. Seek recommendations,
but take all with a grain of salt.
Needs
Food labs accommodating large-scale businesses
with experienced, on-staff microbiologists will
presume you know what you want and are
familiar with lingo. Lab communications can be
cryptic, and making less effort to explain results
generally assumes you know what you are
looking for, are familiar with lab lingo, and can
make less effort to explain results. The result: a
more transactional relationship than you want.
Contact a university’s food testing faculty or hire
a consultant prior to contacting the lab to identify
which pathogens/indicator organisms you will
want to test for, how frequently you will test,
sample specifications, acceptable vs actionable
test results.
Budget
Sampling and testing will have an impact on
your company’s bottom line. Make a budget,
and remember that additional costs can result
from follow-up testing, multiplication of testing,
transport and materials. Composite sampling
can be cost-effective if performed strategically.
Prepare yourself to spend money – knowing
your sampling strategy and the health of your
food safety system will have a significant impact
on cost. The goal of sampling and testing
should always be to detect a positive, if it
exists. Avoiding vulnerable swabs sites, foods/
ingredients or testing methods does not save
money, but increases liability and in the long run
can be substantially more expensive.
Recall Plan
Detecting a positive in a processing environment
or in a food can result in serious costs, a public
health emergency, recall and anxiety. A team
should know exactly what course of action to
take in the event of a ‘presumptive positive’…
conducting pathogen testing (particularly on
foods and food contact surfaces) without having
a recall plan in place is like stumbling through a
mine field.
Like in any business situation, do your due
diligence and realise that a laboratory is an
investment. Testing plays a vital role in food
safety systems by revealing things we cannot
see and, at times, telling us things we may have
never wanted to hear.
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