Levels and types of microbial contaminants in different plant-based ingredients used in dairy alternatives.

In this study levels and types of microbial contaminants were investigated in 88 different plant-based ingredients including many that are used to manufacture dairy alternatives. Studied ingredients encompassed samples of pulses (pea, faba bean, chickpea, and mung bean), cereals/pseudocereals (oat, rice, amaranth and quinoa) and drupes (coconut, almond and cashew). The microbial analysis included: i) total viable count (TVC), ii) total aerobic mesophilic spore count (TMS), iii) heat resistant aerobic thermophilic spore count (HRTS), iv) anaerobic sulfite reducing Clostridium spore count (SRCS), and v) Bacillus cereus spore count (BCES). Microorganisms isolated from the counting plates with the highest sample dilutions were identified using 16S rRNA and MALDI-TOF MS analyses. Many of the investigated ingredients showed a high proportion of spores as part of their total aerobic mesophilic counts. In 63 % of the samples, the difference between TVC and TMS counts was 1 Log

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.