Media Fills Test for Beverages

Linden Grain Medium for Media Fill Simulations of Beverage Bottling and Ice-Crusher Installations

When producing low-acid aseptic beverages, you want to be sure that your filling line is not contaminated with spoilage bacteria, yeasts or molds — not only because millions of product units may be lost but contamination can also result in considerable reprocessing, disposal and product-recall costs, as well as damage to brand reputation and consumer confidence.

Our ready-mixed granulated Linden Grain Medium is a high-quality alternative to powdered media and was successfully developed in cooperation with Coca-Cola HBC AG, Zug, Switzerland for media fill simulations.

It makes life easier

• Ready-mixed and easily soluble
• Granules reduce on-site contamination with media dust
• Available in 5 kg and cost-saving 25 kg sizes

It is safe and ensures results you can trust

• Granulated to minimize toxic and allergenic dust
• Meets highest performance standards in production and QC as described in ISO 11133

Linden Grain Medium halal

• Identical in composition and Performance
• Halal certified acc. to JAKIM Standards
• Only available in powder format

Superior Powdered Media for Media Fill Tests

With our Linden Grain Medium, which is typically prepared in large volumes of more than 5,000 liters for a single media fill test, there is no need to source, buy, mix and quality control individual raw materials.

The unique ganulated format of Linden Grain Medium ensures:

• Excellent solubility and free-flowing properties.
• No component separation and clumping, even under warm or humid conditions.
• Homogenous distribution of non-animal-based ingredients.
• Less dust formation: reduces cleaning efforts and limits the spread of media components that may be hazardous or lead to allergic reactions if inhaled.

Consistent High Quality Media Fill in Aseptic Environments

We are the market leader in providing the strictly regulated pharmaceutical industry with media fills based on dehydrated culture media. We are applying the expertise we have gained to manufacture media fills for the beverage industry, using only carefully selected raw materials. Our quality-control procedures include testing the granulated Linden Grain Medium with typical beverage spoilage strains. These results indicate not only excellent performance (see Table 1), but also a level of batch-to-batch consistency that is difficult to achieve when producing Linden Grain Medium yourself.

Coca-Cola HBC AG, one of the world’s largest cola drinks bottlers, with operations in 28 countries, successfully applies Linden Grain Medium in its aseptic operations.

Suitable for Ice-crusher Testing

An internal study we performed using frozen Linden Grain Medium shows that this culture medium possesses properties that make it suitable for microbial testing of ice-crusher installations:

• Stable after freezing and thawing (color, pH)
• Performance after freezing comparable to freshly prepared medium

Comprehensive Solutions

Typically, a media fill simulation is accompanied by viable and non-viable air monitoring and surface monitoring of the production environment. We offer our MVP ICON^® multipurpose ATP detection system that combines ATP, chemical concentration, pH, temperature and conductivity measurement in one hand-held instrument.

Table 1. Typical spoilage microorganisms of low-acid beverages: Growth in Millipore^® Linden Grain Medium (B.subtilis used as negative growth control).

Test Strains	Evaluation After	Growth
Geosmithia putterillii ATCC 10487	3 – 5 days	good/moderate
Cladosporium cladosporoides ATCC 38494	3 – 5 days	good/moderate
Zygosaccharomyces fermentati ATCC 34891	3 – 5 days	good/moderate
Bacillus subtilis ATCC 6051	1 day	none