Environmental monitoring in food manufacturing: Current perspectives and emerging frontiers

The food production environment provides opportunities for food safety and quality to be compromised by contamination with various pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms. Monitoring the food production environment is critical for enhancing food safety and quality. Environmental monitoring programs (EMPs) allow evaluation of the effectiveness of the preventative controls in food processing plants. To reduce the likelihood of pathogen transmission cleaning and sanitation practices are designed to target the food processing environment and equipment implicated as the root cause of numerous foodborne illness outbreaks. This review summarizes current sampling and verification techniques suitable for food processing equipment as part of EMPs. The authors also discuss some methods under development for monitoring sanitation performance including hyperspectral imaging and biosensors. Food processors need a standard procedure to follow when setting up an EMP. Each processor must tailor these plans by necessity based on the type of facility and food products. Thus, there continues to be a need for cost-effective methods that can detect food soil and microbiological hazards in realtime over large surface areas with greater sensitivity. In this review, we will discuss (1) current methods of environmental sampling in food processing, (2) emerging methods of monitoring cleanliness in the processing environment, and (3) examine how research strategies could focus on cost-effective and user-friendly environmental monitoring.