I love to read. It is my favorite past-time in addition to hiking and paddle boarding. In fact, I love to paddle board out to the middle of the lake and read a book, and then I paddle back when I am done. It is so relaxing. I would rather read than watch TV. What I love most about a good book is the feeling I get when I am done reading. A great author will take me from start to finish with a plan. The ups and down and twist and turns are on purpose and the emotional reactions from the reader are planned. The story is engaging and relatable. Unfortunately, not all story books give me this same response. Some are duds. I don’t like duds.

This same thought applies to food safety. We all want a good story about our food safety system. We want to feel good about what we are doing and how we are doing it. We also want our customers to feel good about our story and trust us, value us, and have confidence in our products.

How do we develop these good food safety stories? By biomapping. Biomapping uses microbial testing and data analysis to understand pathogen movement through processing. In order to develop a good biomapping study, we need to clearly state our objective, clearly define what we mean by success, and have a strong experimental design, data analyses and interpretation. Just like a good book, it is a planned approach.

Our objective should answer the question: What do we want to know? For example, we want to decrease Salmonella load throughout our process. From our objective, we should be able to clearly define what we consider success. For example, we want to decrease Salmonella load throughout our process by 3cfu/ml. Some establishments may focus on prevalence versus load. What is best is really a different discussion, but there should be some internal dialogue as to how success is measured. The next step is to develop a strong experimental design including data collection and analysis and interpretation. Sounds simple, but really, this is a planned approach.

Probably the most often-asked question is, how many samples should I take for a good biomap? In order to answer this question, we must first understand our establishment variation. Variation is much more important than averages and our samples sizes should reflect our true variation. If variation in your system is unknown, then take some time to collect some samples (minimum of 3 samples per day for a week as an example) to help determine variation.

Variation and sample size are critical to a good food safety story and should be developed by working with a statistician or at minimum using a sample size calculator. These calculators take into account variation, power and confidence levels to ensure a strong statistically designed biomap. Assistance from a statistician is highly encouraged as there are assumptions associated with statistical methods which should be considered prior to data analysis. Statisticians can help clearly define and implement experimental designs and analyze and interpret data for our food safety story. They are like great authors who plans and has the objective and definition of success in mind before the book is written.

There is nothing worse than collecting data and asking, “Now what?” This incomplete process does not develop a story line for our food safety program. Formulation of the story based on sound science and good data allows us to then tell our food safety story with confidence. This confidence is what instills trust from our customers and confidence in our products. Let’s not be duds. Let’s be excited about our food safety story. There is nothing more exciting than meeting with a customer and feeling confident in our food safety story.

Developing our food safety story

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