Many foods produced on an industrial scale include raw ingredients mixed together in enormous stainless-steel machines that can be difficult to clean. With repeated use, equipment surfaces get minute scratches and grooves, providing bacteria and biofilms the perfect place to hide. While surface scratches may appear small to the naked eye, they are like a canyon to bacteria, which are only a few micrometers in size.
Surface-trapped food residue and bacteria then increase the risk of contamination from microorganisms such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli.
Researchers from the University of Toronto Professor Ben Hatton (MSE), Dr Dalal Asker and Dr Tarek Awad research cheaper, safer and more effective ways to prevent bacteria thriving inside these machines. This minimizes the risk of cross contamination, which can lead to foodborne disease. Their team have proposed a simple new solution: trapping a thin layer of cooking oil at the metal surface to fill in microscopic scrapes, cracks and fissures and create a barrier to bacterial attachment.
They found that this solution resulted in a 1,000x reduction in bacterial levels inside the industrial machines tested.
Their work is recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Many foods produced on an industrial scale include raw ingredients mixed together in enormous stainless-steel machines that can be difficult to clean. With repeated use, equipment surfaces get minute scratches and grooves, providing bacteria and biofilms the perfect place to hide. While surface scratches may appear small to the naked eye, they are like a canyon to bacteria, which are only a few micrometers in size.
Surface-trapped food residue and bacteria then increase the risk of contamination from microorganisms such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli.
Researchers from the University of Toronto Professor Ben Hatton (MSE), Dr Dalal Asker and Dr Tarek Awad research cheaper, safer and more effective ways to prevent bacteria thriving inside these machines. This minimizes the risk of cross contamination, which can lead to foodborne disease. Their team have proposed a simple new solution: trapping a thin layer of cooking oil at the metal surface to fill in microscopic scrapes, cracks and fissures and create a barrier to bacterial attachment.
They found that this solution resulted in a 1,000x reduction in bacterial levels inside the industrial machines tested.
Their work is recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
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