Your sample arrives before 10am in a chilled box, barcode up. What happens next is a choreography refined over thousands of runs — here is the 48-hour journey, hour by hour.
Hours 0–2: Intake and enrichment
Intake logs the barcode, checks the temperature logger and photographs the seals. Then 25 grams go into enrichment broth — a warm, nutritious bath that lets even a handful of stressed cells multiply to detectable levels overnight. This step is why "rapid" testing still takes a day: you cannot detect what hasn't grown.
Hours 18–26: Screening
Enriched samples move to PCR screening for Salmonella, Listeria and STEC. PCR doesn't wait for colonies; it hunts DNA directly, and by the next morning we know which samples are clear and which need a closer look. Clears are reported the same day.
Hours 26–48: Confirmation
A screening hit is never reported as a positive on its own — it is a suspect until culture confirmation says otherwise. Suspects are plated to selective media, colonies are identified biochemically, and only then does the report go out, with the isolate retained for further typing if you need it.
Why the discipline matters
Shortcuts in pathogen testing produce exactly two outcomes: false alarms that cost you a recall you didn't need, or false clears that cost far more. The 48-hour workflow exists because biology refuses to be hurried — so we built our promises around biology instead.
Put your products through the workflow
Routine pathogen screening with same-day clears and confirmed positives — scheduled around your production.
Schedule screening
Dr. Elena Marsh
Food Microbiologist — leads Culinova's micro bench and field team.