Case Study: Detecting Contamination

How confident are you that your sampling plans ensure the rapid detection of unanticipated contamination events with minimum resources?

One of the key challenges in food and drink manufacturing is to ensure that product safety is maintained by carrying out testing procedures and enabling the quick detection of contamination with minimum human and equipment resources. At the same time, manufacturers must conform to existing regulations to design positive action sampling plans to avoid and control contamination incidents. It is also important for the manufacturer to maintain the balance between the amount of testing and costs involved. Under-testing can lead to endangering the consumer and losing brand reputation while over-testing exposes a company to unnecessary costs and loss of product.

Building on our expertise and experience, the Smith Institute offers independent expert advice on existing sampling plans and on designing statistically sound and verifiable sampling plans to detect contamination incidents in food manufacturing and other sectors. We have developed specific expertise in designing sampling plans to give confidence in the detection of heterogeneous contamination events, which is currently not accounted for accurately in published guidelines, and could affect almost any manufacturing company.

We understand the importance of achieving the efficiency of sampling plans at low cost and use our experience of working with industry to address the individual business requirements of each company.

For more information on our Expert Sampling Plans please contact Dr Heather Tewkesbury.