Staphylococcal ecosystem of kitoza, a traditional malagasy meat product

Kitoza is a traditional meat product from Madagascar manufactured with strips of pork or beef. The process in-cludes afirst step of salting and mixing with spices followed by sun-drying or smoking step. As salting and dryingselect coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS), our aim was to identify the CNS species in kitoza with the objec-tive in the future of developing indigenous starters. Microbial analyses revealed that the only pathogenic bacte-rium enumerated wasStaphylococcus aureus, which was found in 54% of the samples. The level ofEnterobacteriaceaerevealed a rather good hygienic quality of these products. CNS were confirmed in all the sam-ples at high levels ranging from 5 to 7 log cfu/g. Identification of CNS species in a large collection of 829 isolatesrevealed 9 identified species, 7 for beef and 8 for pork kitoza. There were significant difference in the distributionof CNS speciesaccording to the type of meat and the process.Staphylococcus saprophyticuswasthe dominant spe-cies for sun-dried or smoked beef and sun-dried pork kitoza(73–75%), while for smoked pork kitozaStaphylococ-cus equorum(26%),S. saprophyticus(23%),Staphylococcus succinus(23%) andStaphylococcus epidermidis(17%)co-dominated. Some CNS could be used as indigenous starters in particular to compete againstS. aureus