Composite sampling for Salmonella testing
My facility produces dry blend ingredients and spices and we generally conduct Salmonella testing with a sampling procedure of compositing 15 separate samples of 25gm each and test for Absence/ 375gm. However on a special request we produced only 200 lb of the product and thinking of testing on 375gm but by pulling only 5 samples from the whole production lot. is it still acceptable or should i still consider collecting 15 samples as it's not a homogenous product?
Hi Zesty Scientist,
Welcome to the IFSQN forums
If your normal batch size is 600 lb or greater then I don’t think it is unreasonable to composite 5 samples from a 200 lb batch.
Kind regards,
Tony
My facility produces dry blend ingredients and spices and we generally conduct Salmonella testing with a sampling procedure of compositing 15 separate samples of 25gm each and test for Absence/ 375gm. However on a special request we produced only 200 lb of the product and thinking of testing on 375gm but by pulling only 5 samples from the whole production lot. is it still acceptable or should i still consider collecting 15 samples as it's not a homogenous product?
Hi ZS,
It may relate to whether you wish to follow BAM's sampling Procedure. The latter is based on statistical grounds regarding the level of confidence with which you wish to declare that there is less than X% Salmonella in the sampled "lot" assuming all samples test negative. 15 negative samples IIRC correlates to X=20 at a 95% Confidence level (assuming random sampling). "Acceptability" depends on your desired value of X.
Nonetheless, many Countries do use a sample size of n=5, c=0 to decide "Acceptability" for Salmonella.