3M Food Safety Launches 24-Hour Aerobic Bacteria Indicator Test

Thirty years ago, 3M launched its first 3M Petrifilm Plate, the 3M™ Petrifilm™ Aerobic Count Plate, ushering in a solution that has been widely viewed as a step forward in ensuring the quality and safety of food manufacturers’ products and freeing space and productivity in their labs. Today, 3M Food Safety builds on that legacy by announcing the global launch of the 3M™ Petrifilm™ Rapid Aerobic Count Plate, the next generation of its trusted, accurate and easy test that can detect aerobic bacteria counts in just 24 hours for most food matrices.

The ability to accurately and efficiently enumerate aerobic bacteria is important to food and beverage processors, who need to make time-sensitive decisions critical to ensuring their product quality and the stability of their manufacturing processes. Proven to be as reliable as Standard Methods Agar, the 3M Petrifilm Rapid Aerobic Count Plate offers a faster time-to-result, technology that reduces the impact of spreader colonies, and a simplified inoculation area to drive greater efficiency and reduce costly retesting and delayed results. 3M Petrifilm Rapid Aerobic Count Plates also leverages a dual-sensing indicator technology for easy enumeration of colonies in raw material, in-process and finished product food testing as well as environmental air, swab or surface contact testing.

The new 3M Petrifilm Rapid Aerobic Count Plate has received certification (#121403) from the AOAC® INTERNATIONAL Performance Tested Methods℠ (PTM) program inserts. Specific studies performed as part of this certification involved comparison tests to the FDA BAM and USDA reference methods, along with robustness and lot-to-lot/stability testing.

“We are proud to be taking yet another innovative step forward with the seventeenth addition to the 3M Petrifilm Plate portfolio and our tenth product offering that delivers results in 24-hours or less,” said Jason Semerad, global marketing manager, 3M Food Safety. “Ultimately, this is about saving food and beverage processing plants time and capital while maintaining the highest degree of accuracy and reliability to ensure customers and their hard-earned brand equity are protected.”

Today, 91 of the top 100 U.S. food processing companies rely on 3M for their indicator testing needs. The sample-ready system uses an easy three-step process: Inoculation, Incubation and Enumeration. The system contains nutrients, a coldwater-soluble gelling agent, and a dual-sensing indicator technology that facilitates colony enumeration for most food matrices. Incubation temperatures are 32° C or 35°C.

For more information, please visit www.3M.com/foodsafety/RapidAerobicCount

3M Food Safety is a leader of innovative solutions that help the food and beverage industries optimize the quality and safety of their products to enable consumer protection. At every step, 3M Food Safety provides solutions that help mitigate risk, improve operational efficiencies and impact the bottom line. For more information, visit www.3M.com/foodsafety or follow @3M_FoodSafety on Twitter.

About 3M
3M captures the spark of new ideas and transforms them into thousands of ingenious products. Our culture of creative collaboration inspires a never-ending stream of powerful technologies that make life better. 3M is the innovation company that never stops inventing. With $31 billion in sales, 3M employs 89,000 people worldwide and has operations in more than 70 countries. For more information, visit www.3M.com or follow @3MNews on Twitter.

AOAC RI, based in Gaithersburg, MD, is a subsidiary of AOAC International, a globally recognized, independent, not-for-profit association founded in 1884. AOAC serves communities of the analytical sciences by providing the tools and processes necessary to develop voluntary consensus standards or technical standards through stakeholder consensus and working groups in which the fit-for-purpose and method performance criteria are established and fully documented. AOAC provides a science-based solution and its Official Methods of Analysis gives defensibility, credibility and confidence in decision-making. AOAC Official Methods are accepted and recognized worldwide.

3M and Petrifilm are trademarks of 3M.