Caroline Østergaard Klein, Martin Laage Kragh, Philip Junker Andersen, Niels Agersnap, Jesper Bryde-Jacobsen, Lisbeth Truelstrup Hansen (2025).
Journal of Microbiological Methods
In the food industry, time-to-result is crucial for faster release of products, minimising recalls, mitigation of microbial contamination problems and, ultimately, food safety. Carrageenan is isolated from red seaweed (Rhodophyta) and applied in various foods and beverages as a gelling, thickening, texturing, or stabilising agent due to its hygroscopic properties. Currently, the standard industry plate count method entails a one-hundred-fold dilution of the sample before mixing with molten agar for assessing the level of microbial contamination in carrageenan samples prior to business-to-business shipment. However, even at this dilution, carrageenan swells, forms clumps, clogs pipettes, and leaves thick gel structures, bubbles, and debris in agar plates causing microbial enumeration to be challenging and subject to human error. Here, we report, for the first time, the application of mini agar plates monitored by the automated time-lapse microscopy IntuGrow solution to assess the microbiological quality in the challenging food ingredient.
