Microbiological Food Safety and Quality: Control, Cases and Practicals

The purpose of the course is to provide an understanding of microbial food safety and hygiene in the entire production chain and to provide tools to identify and solve problems pertinent to food safety and hygiene. 

Upon completion the students should be able to:

Knowledge

• Identify and characterize common infectious agents and toxins of relevance to food safety, including the risk they pose for human health. 
• Describe the principles behind detection of food borne pathogens (monitoring, sampling and detection methods) 
• Describe the common preservation principles 
• Have insight in the elements and tools in predictive microbiology 
• Understand the application of advanced biological intervention strategies. 
• Understand the interplay between safe foods and sustainable food production
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Skills

• Work in the laboratory with selected experimental techniques that are applied in food safety.
• Use relevant software for monitoring, predicting, and preventing microbial food hazards.
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Competences

• Use principles and methods for identifying and solving problems of importance to food safety.
• Investigate and predict microbiological safety and quality problems 
• Evaluate basic food hygiene programmes from the processing steps to the consumer 
• Evaluate the extent to which existing and novel interventions strategies are fulfilling current legislation.
• Cooperate with technical staff and fellow students on setting up, performing and evaluating laboratory experiments to address food safety issues.