Contributions to food safety acceptance sampling plans : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics, Massey University, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences

Abstract

An appropriate sampling inspection method is an essential tool for risk assessment in the food industry. A representative sampling approach will be helpful to reduce risk while minimising the sampling costs. Consequently, food manufacturers are employing efficient sampling approaches to assure food safety. In the food safety field, microbiological or other contamination often spreads unevenly across the production. Many factors are involved in the microbial risk assessment, such as (1) the amount of sample used for inspection, (2) what sampling methods were applied, (3) laboratory testing procedures, (4) physical sampling of materials from lots/batches of products and (5) the mixing of initially collected samples. This study focusses on improved sampling inspection approaches to reduce microbiological risk in food products.

Part of this research also included developing open-source R packages to generate graphical displays for probabilistic risk assessment for practitioners. A single “wrapper” package is also provided to install all the newly developed packages in a single step.