Introduction

When pasteurization is not an option to eliminate the microbiological load of a product, due to temperature sensitivity, filtration steps are routinely employed.

Even though filtration through 0,22 µm filters is an effective procedure, significant product loss can be expected.

Prior to this case study, the producer consistently measured a microbiological load below their guideline levels of 104 CFU/g before the last filtration rendering it redundant.

Due to the redundancy of the filtration product was lost with no real impact on the quality of the formulated product.

The major obstacle for optimizing this process is the long time-toresult (TTR) of the traditional microbiological method (48-72 hours ISO 4833-1). By implementing IntuGrow this TTR can be reduced to 5-6 hours allowing for adaptive processing of the post-fermentation product with simultaneous analysis of multiple points throughout the line.

This enables not only processing decisions resulting in higher yield but also a close monitoring of the production line, with fast response to variations in quality.