Nordic networking towards improved dairy hygiene

The control of hygiene is essential for providing wholesome and safe food products to consumers. The intention of dairies is to minimise the risk of spoiled foodstuffs caused by pathogens or other harmful microbes. The requirements for improved hygiene are raising due to the development of the food industry, including prolonged shelf life, centralised production and long-distance transportation, automated cleaning systems, reduced cleaning time and demands for environmentally friendly cleaning agents. Development of detection and identification methods for assessing microbial and organic soil on surfaces, in air, on packaging and in raw material as well as products are needed to ensure that the results obtained are reliable and repeatable. In an industrial point of view it is important to maintain and extend the interactive contacts between persons dealing with safety and environmental questions in Nordic dairies. Three subsequent 3-year projects, Sanitation in dairies - Sanitering i mejeri, DairyNl - Evaluation of cleaning agents and disinfectants for use in dairies: methods and mechanisms and DairyNET - Hygiene control in dairies, has been carried out since 1994. The aim of these Nordic dairy hygiene network projects is to provide reliable methods for validating and improving cleaning and hygiene in process scale at dairies by applying new knowledge and by using available laboratory and pilot scale equipment in the experimental set-ups. Nordic Innovation Centre (NICe; earlier Nordic Industrial Fund), national technology agencies as well as industrial and research partners have been funding these projects