Ambient Air Limits in Food Processing

Hello All! 

Preparing for our annual audit and I am having a hard time finding firm limits for ambient air passive sampling. We have set the plates out for 15 minutes and the results are under 40 CFU. Does anyone have a document that confirms this is within specification for a nut packhouse facility? Any help is appreciated!

MDP

In the absence of limits, you should establish your baseline and then decide when you need to take action.  Run some stats on the data.  See what 3 standard deviations look like.  Or go with a nice round number like 100 CFU.  The auditors care less about what the number is and whether you take action when you said you would. 

In a case where there is no clear regulatory standard, it is usually up to you to decide what is acceptable.  You could use your historical data to say that if observed rates stay below [X] you do not have an unacceptable level of consumer complaints -- and if you do observe rates over [X] you will take [Y] additional sanitation actions, and [Z] additional finished product testing until rates are again reduced to below [X].