ISO 17468, “Microbiology of the food chain – Technical requirements and guidance on establishment or revision of a standardized reference method,” has just been released. It’s one of a number of new food chain microbiology standards issued by ISO during the last month. This standard was developed in order to set up common rules for the validation of reference methods standardized in the field of food microbiology.
Keeping the food chain free from harmful organisms is an essential task for all food regulators and producers. Failure results both in illness and even death but also in extraordinary expense and loss of public trust. Therefore, those of you regulating or providing products intended for human consumption and/or animal feed need to be particularly vigilant. This means the use of sampling and other test methods to assure the quality of goods within the pipeline.
Setting up a program that can reliably identify various microorganisms as early as possible is essential. But what tests to use and when? This is where standards developers come in. Since the globalization of our food sourcing has become commonplace, a need for international standards for testing various materials for a wide variety of micro-organisms has been established.
ISO 17468 provides a guideline on how to evaluate a potential new test in order to set the stage for standardization of the process. It establishes a series of steps necessary for technical verification of a new reference method. These steps include not only the selection of the possible test but the studies required to support the case for standardization. These include evaluation, multilaboratory, validation and interlaboratory studies. A flowchart is included in Annex A.
Supporting this work are two new standards that are referenced in the ISO 17468. They are ISO 16140-1, “Microbiology of the food chain – Method validation – Part 1: Vocabulary,” and ISO 16140-2, “Microbiology of the food chain – Method validation – Part 2: Protocol for the validation of alternative (proprietary) methods against a reference method.” As you can see, ISO/TC 34/SC 9’s working group 6 for microbiology of the food chain has been hard at work setting up the structure for further standardization.
If you’re tasked with standardizing or regulating identification of hazards in the food chain or have products that are impacted by this work, you may want to get a copy of this new ISO standard or the companion documents. Document Center Inc. is an authorized distributor of the ISO standards and you can search for and order them at our webstore, www.document-center.com. Here’s a direct link to the order page for ISO 17468 for your convenience.
Have further questions or need personalized assistance? Just contact our staff by phone (650-591-7600) or email (info@document-center.com). We’ve been selling standards since 1982 and recognize that there’s more to standardization than just the transaction. So our staff can provide you with knowledgeable support. And we have a wide range of supporting services as well. Our notification service is best-in-class. Make us your Standards Experts!