The agri-food industry routinely enumerates microbial flora, which indicates the microbiological quality of the entire production process, from raw materials to finished products. In close collaboration with international experts in food microbiology, and using its experience and know-how in culture media and instrumentation, bioMérieux has developed TEMPO®, the first automated solution for direct quality indicator enumeration in food products.
TEMPO automates testing for total viable counts, coliform counts, generic E. coli, and Enterobacteriaceae, lactic acid bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, and yeasts/moulds. Testing for these organisms is important to a food quality laboratory for determining overall product hygiene and also as an indication of product spoilage.
Benefits of Tempo:
- Time-savings: with TEMPO, results are faster than conventional methods (i.e: 24hr to 48hr), providing more rapid selection and orientation of raw materials, accelerated corrective actions in case of non compliance, speedier product release, improved stock rotation, etc.
- Traceability: every consumable item is traced through a barcode identification. The unique card barcode ensures full traceability throughout the analytical procedure, from the sample ID until the final result. All data is saved and can be easily retrieved for quality assurance purposes
- Ease of use: using intuitive icons and user friendly software, TEMPO is very easy to operate and requires less than two days of training to be routinely used
- Standardisation: as most of the analytical steps are automated, TEMPO improves the consistency of results from plant to plant, day to day, country to country and therefore operator variability is removed
- Cost-savings: the TEMPO card covers several dilutions, so only one TEMPO test is needed instead of multiple plates to obtain the most relevant result according to each criteria. It also eliminates time-consuming tasks such as media preparation, manual dilutions and identifications
TEMPO helps you to gain time for other tasks such as:
- Assessing production process to better understand and anticipate possible non-compliance
- Carrying out trend analyses of results
- Revisiting HACCP plan and monitor the critical control points
- Improving the training of production personnel in microbiological risks
- Reinforcing food pathogen control plan or increase chemical analyses
- Increasing testing analyses
As with all bioMérieux industry microbiology solutions, TEMPO tests are submitted to external organisations such as AOAC International and AFNOR.
Current validations include:
- TEMPO TVC: enumeration of aerobic mesophilic total flora in 40hr-48hr; AFNOR/ISO 16140 BIO 12/15-09/05; AOAC OMA Official MethodSM – N° 2008.10
- TEMPO TC: enumeration of total coliforms according to the ISO 4832 definition in 24hr; AFNOR/ISO 16140 BIO 12/17-12/05
- TEMPO CC: enumeration of coliforms according to the FDA-BAM definition in 24hr; AOAC RI Performance TestedSM Method – Certificate N° 060702
- TEMPO EC: enumeration of Escherichia coli in 24hr; AFNOR/ISO 16140 BIO 12/13-02/05; AOAC RI Performance TestedSM Method – Certificate N° 080603; AOAC Official MethodSM N° 2009.02
- TEMPO EB: enumeration of Enterobacteriaceae in 24hr; AFNOR/ISO 16140 BIO 12/21-12/06; AOAC RI Performance TestedSM Method – Certificate N° 050801
- TEMPO STA: enumeration of coagulase-positive staphylococci (Staphylococcus aureus) in 24hr; AFNOR/ISO 16140 BIO 12/28-04/10; AOAC RI Performance TestedSM Method – Certificate N° 120901
- TEMPO LAB: enumeration of lactic acid bacteria in 40hr-48hr
- TEMPO YM: enumeration of yeasts and moulds in 72hr-76hr; AOAC RI Performance TestedSM Method – Certificate N° 041001
