The 3M Clean-Trace Hygiene Monitoring and Management System for testing food or beverage manufacturing surfaces, has received AOAC Performance Tested Method (PTM) Certificate No. 041901 from the AOAC Research Institute.
The solution’s performance claim to detect adenosine triphosphate (ATP) on common food manufacturing contact surfaces with consistency and stability was evaluated through the AOAC PTM program.
The scope of this evaluation expanded beyond what has been evaluated for other ATP systems on the market today.
It concluded that the 3M system is a reliable and rapid method for the detection of low levels of ATP, both as pure analyte, and from food and microbial sources, on three surfaces: stainless steel, ceramic and plastic.
The study also evaluated the system’s robustness and determined the method was able to distinguish low and high levels of ATP when used over a range of activation times (2-15 seconds) and temperatures (10-35 C) often experienced in use.
In addition, study results demonstrate that 3M’s technology detects ATP and provides actionable results in the presence of common sanitizers used in the food industry.
A full report on the research used for the certification will be published in the Journal of AOAC International within the next year.
The system can help bridge the gap between an immediate but imperfect visual inspection and the time-consuming process of microbial culturing of collected samples.
It takes seconds to test for the presence of ATP, a molecular indicator of biological residue.
