New Surrogates in Low-moisture Food/Petfood Process Validation, Are We Ready to Use Them?

The publication of Food Safety Modernization Act final rules has forced the multinational food companies as well as medium and small food producers to move forward and to start, or continue, the work to validate a variety of different processes for numerous products. Many of these processes have never been validated in the past and no validation approach or strategy has been established for this purpose. In this context, the use of surrogate microorganisms for process validation has become the most common approach, nevertheless, a number of limitations have been described and need to be overtaken.

Although specific surrogates, as Enterococcus faeciumNRRL B-2354 (ATCC^® 8459™), have been widely used in the validation of different low-moisture food products, we cannot talk nowadays about standard or universal surrogates. A good surrogate can be only defined after a complete research program that take into account a number of variables, such as, the target pathogen, the physical-chemical characteristics of the food matrix, the process to be validated and the specific kill-step, etc.

But a question needs to be now answered: Are the food companies prepared to support these research programs and to use the new surrogates developed?