Rapid Microbiology from Millipore Helps Manufacturers Deliver Iced Teas to Market Rapidly

By Rajiv Juneja, Exec. GM, Millipore India, http://www.fnbnews.com/

 

The iced tea market in India, though small compared to the hot version of the beverage, is growing at a steady clip. Its growth is triggered by consumer trials and product experiences in the country's retail networks of cafes and tea parlours that are mushrooming. The phenomenon is not just limited to cosmopolitan metros like Mumbai and Delhi. Even mini metros and class I towns across India are cooling off regularly with increasing intake of iced teas. What's helping the trend is that this refreshing drink is attracting new users from the teenage and young adult age groups. The similarity in the taste of iced teas and popular cola based carbonated drinks helps attract youngsters. An iced tea is also perceived to be up-market and trendy. The health conscious also believes that organic versions of the tea with natural taste enhancers like lemon, mint, herbs and honey are healthy. The trend is catching on!

New trends are also emerging in the processing of iced teas at the manufacturers' end, especially in the areas of quality checks and process monitoring. With new rapid microbiology detection systems that quickly detect process related contamination in iced teas and help improve their quality management systems. Milliflex is a new automated rapid microbiology detection platform from Millipore that is helping manufacturers reduce the risks of costly product recall by anticipating product failure. Further, by reducing the time it takes to conduct microbial tests, Milliflex is helping manufacturers release the final product to the market much sooner.

But what are the quality control people looking out for? They are seeking to detect and remove in a timely manner, spoilage organisms that spoil the taste, flavour and turbidity of iced teas. Organisms that could even give iced tea an unpleasant smell. Specifically organisms called Saccharomyces spp. which iced teas are prone to develop because of their high pH content. The product can be compromised at any stage of the production process.

Traditional contamination detection methods take as much as three days for contamination in iced teas to be detected. Millipore is a pioneer in the area of Rapid Microbiology Detection and Enumeration Systems. Incubation time using Milliflex protocol can be reduced to just about 17 hours as some optimisation protocols have demonstrated. Milliflex combines three proven detection technologies. ATP bioluminescence, membrane filtration and image analysis. It's because the composition of iced tea poses a lot of challenges to accurate and reliable detection. And product safety just cannot be compromised.

Iced tea is difficult to filter and the presence of certain molecules in it can restrict bioluminescence reactions or create undesired background noise for accurate detection and analysis. Millipore's rapid detection has the convenient advantage that its protocol can be optimised at the manufacturer's site immediately after the production of tea in the manufacturer's test environment.

In certain tests done by Millipore, the enumeration of the organism colonies was achieved in 17 hours as opposed to 36 hours by traditional methods. No background interference, false positives or false negatives was observed. The ability to do this in half the time taken by conventional PMT tools enables iced tea manufacturers to address quality issues if any, almost immediately. Safe products can now be released to market much sooner. With the guarantee of taste and flavour!

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