The Kraft Heinz Company and Soleris® - A Customer Testimonial

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Giuliana Di Costanzo:

My name is Giuliana Di Costanzo, and I am the Microbiological Lab leader at the Kraft Heinz manufacturing facility in Latina. Kraft Heinz is a global company with manufacturing sites all around the world. The company has a wide portfolio of powerful and iconic brands, such as Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Oscar Mayer, Weight Watchers, and many others.

Here at Latina we focus on manufacturing baby food products, including homogenized and textured ready-to-eat products prepared with fruits, vegetables, and meats. We also manufacture the famous Italian Plasmon biscuits. We cover everything for the infant feeding business. Our products are packaged in lots of different ways to ensure they stay fresh and safe for the consumer before we distribute to Italy, the UK and Canada.

To ensure we are producing high quality products and that our baby food products are safe for the consumer to eat, we carry out testing of raw materials, in process samples, finished goods, ingredient water, and thermal process evaluation. We specifically test for commercial sterility on our finished goods because the thermal processes we implement must achieve a sterile product, and we aim to prove that.

As part of our microbiological risk assessment, we test for Enterobacteria, yeast & molds, lactic acid bacteria and thermo-resistant spores, these are the most critical microbiological risks related to the properties of our products and our factory.

When choosing a method for testing these organisms we focus on sensitivity and related rapidity to get a reliable result. This is important to use because we have the necessity to release the finished goods in the shortest time, but we need to be sure that the product is safe and commercially sterile.

That’s why we use the Neogen® Soleris® system. We have used the Soleris system for one year and half and we run tests every week. We have run about 1,500 analyses since we installed the system. We love using the system because it allows to test multiple samples simultaneously, to get quick results and it’s an easy way of working.

Working with Neogen has been great because they have supported us through constant remote assistance. This helped us to understand the best way to use the instrument, how to adapt and improve our way of working, and how to adjust the setting parameters and Soleris vials to work most effectively with our product.

The Soleris system is able to detect a wide range of microorganisms, including the spores that other instruments are not able to detect. I would definitely recommend working with Neogen and the Soleris system because it’s really a good instrument that combines high sensitivity and speed.