MicroFit v1.0

As part of new product development (NPD), food companies invest much time, money and effort to ensure that their new products are both safe, and have an adequate shelf life. This can involve the generation of a large amount of microbiological growth data from challenge tests, as well as the use of predictions from software tools such as MicroModel.

A new software tool, MicroFit, has been developed by the Institute of Food Research to allow microbiologists to extract growth parameters from challenge test data. The parameters (such as growth rate, doubling time and lag time) may be compared directly with those predicted from tools such as MicroModel, and are a convenient way of summarising the information held within the challenge test data. Useful as that is, MicroFit does more than just extract the growth parameters. It also allows you to:

• Fit a growth model to the data to obtain parameter estimates for...
  • Growth rate and doubling time
    (µ _m and t_d)
  • Lag time (t_lag)
  • Initial cell count (N₀)
  • Final cell count (N_max)
• Estimate confidence intervals on these parameters
• Simultaneously analyse two data sets and compare them graphically
• Perform statistical testing on differences between two data sets
• Maintain indexes of sets of microbiological growth data

MicroFit was developed during a four year LINK project entitled "Food Structure and Microbial Growth", which commenced in October 1995. The project was funded under the auspices of the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's Advanced and Hygienic Food Manufacturing LINK Programme, with the following industrial partners:

• United Biscuits
• Unigate European Foods
• Sainsbury's Supermarkets
• DuPont Cereals Innovation Centre

Having used MicroFit themselves, the LINK partners would now like to make the package available to others, so that they may also benefit from it. MicroFit runs under Windows 95, 98 and NT, and can be downloaded free of charge.

Download MicroFit 1.0