5 Things Not to Do With ATP Monitoring

The test is designed to detect invisible or trace amounts of product residue. When performing sample collections, it is important to make sure not to overload the swab bud with too much sample. Some products in very high concentration can inhibit the bioluminescence reaction.
This also means that when collecting a sample, you should make sure to use aseptic techniques. Do not touch the swab or the inside of the sampling device with your fingers.

Don’t Assume a High Reading Indicates Supply Chain Failure

ATP monitoring is a valuable tool for determining the potential for contamination and can help improve processes at every step in the food supply chain. Too often, a reading with high RLUs, indicating potential contaminants and possibly even pathogens, is interpreted as a failure of personnel to keep things clean. To counteract this misperception, ATP monitoring can be used as a staff or contractor training tool.

Any successful cleaning efforts require a plan, including setting up an HACCP process. ATP can provide nearly instantaneous data to find possible gaps in your processes that can be quickly and efficiently closed by changing cleaning methods, protocols, or locations. Far better to identify potential issues at an early stage than later when pathogens can cause costly shutdowns. Furthermore, a high RLU indicates that intervention and cleaning steps need to be taken, and re-testing the same area can determine the effective of those efforts.

Training should include the use of ATP monitoring and the efficient use of data storage and tracking, which relies on software packages (such as Hygiena’s SureTrend cloud-based software) that can record trends in your facility and point out areas that need improvement. This is also helpful when supply sources, technology, and equipment are changed, which will alter how you monitor and clean your facility. Training efforts and a quest for continuous improvement should be an integral part of your facility’s culture, and the data that comes from ATP monitoring can form a solid foundation for creating that culture.

Don’t Under Sample

A cleanliness monitoring system should be thorough enough to sample every potential area where contamination could possibly occur. Food contact areas (direct and indirect) and hard-to-clean areas should be the main focus of your swabbing program. Direct contact areas are surfaces where the presence of any contaminant will taint the final product. Indirect contact areas are those where splashed product, dust, or liquid has the potential to be dropped, drained, or transferred onto the product. Hard-to-clean areas may include filler heads, O-rings, nozzles, and areas with irregularly-shaped surfaces, corners, grooves, and cracks.

A recent study showed that some amount of over-sampling (overlapping some areas at times) can be an effective way to get robust ATP results and prevent possible contamination. While Hygiena advises structured, repeated cleaning schedules on key environmental surfaces and a sampling area of 4 x 4 inches, certain intricate surfaces in food contact areas may benefit from using smaller sampling areas, such as 2 x 2 inches. Re-testing is still a vital part of maintaining facility cleanliness, too.

Don’t Test Inconsistently

Hygiena advocates for the development of a comprehensive cleaning schedule and map of environmental surfaces, including the sampling of “high touch” areas in facilities. The schedule should include multiple sampling sites on a surface and reliable recordkeeping on online reporting tools to track cleanliness and re-testing of areas, especially those areas that result in higher RLUs. A number of researchers claim that ATP measurements suffer from too much variability in results partly because of inadequate cleaning and monitoring strategies.

Consistent testing starts with a solid plan and means to evaluate it:

• Set up all the locations, users, and test plans before testing so that running reports is easy and accurate;
• There’s no need to create reports from scratch—preprogrammed reports can be modified and saved;
• Graphs can be quickly converted to line, bar, or pie charts depending on preference;
• Sharing reports with team members in regular meetings initiates a conversation on improvement opportunities and positively reinforces successes;
• Share these reports with executives and quality committee members to demonstrate how ATP cleaning verification helped improve cleanliness; and
• Compare these reports to any existing contamination/bacterial infection data to correlate cleaning improvements with infection rate reductions.

Consistency isn’t just about sampling locations, however. For consistent readings, surfaces should be swabbed in the same conditions (always wet or always dry). This will make it easier to compare data and look for trends that might need attention.