Food contamination by pathogenic bacteria represents a major public health, environmental and economic challenge. In 2023, the Swiss Federal Food Safety Office reported 73 product recalls and 17 public warnings, with pathogens like Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella as leading causes. Every year tens of millions of tons of food products are wasted and recalls cost food companies billions of francs.
Detecting bacterial pathogens quickly is essential to mitigating these negative consequences, but current detection methods rely on slow bacterial cultures and require up to 5 days to provide results. This delay creates a significant bottleneck for quality control managers, as a single day of delay can result in a recall and tons of wasted products. With Bioneris, we are combining Raman spectroscopy and microfluidics to enable rapid detection of bacterial contamination directly on-site using patent-pending technology.
Through the implementation of our technology, we aim to impact food quality control by creating a product that delivers same-day release, providing actionable results for the industry.

In the first phase of the Innobooster project, we will validate our method with simulated industrial samples using our in-house measurement set-up, and compare results with standard established methods, while investing in R&D for the future scaling of our technology so that it can be produced at mass-scale. Next, we will begin pilot tests with industrial partners.

Myriad Optics identifie les bactéries sur les lignes de production, pme.ch, 14 October 2024