Rethinking Listeria monitoring: faster, simpler solutions for food safety & environmental testing

Discover how modern Listeria monitoring solutions can support faster, more reliable food and environmental testing, and help elevate your laboratory’s efficiency and confidence in results.

Listeria remains one of the most challenging pathogens for the food industry due to its ability to persist in production environments and survive under conditions that inhibit many other bacteria, including refrigeration and high-salt processing. Its association with severe illness and food recalls places ongoing pressure on manufacturers and laboratories to detect contamination quickly and reliably across both food and environmental samples.

This webinar will explore how Listeria monitoring solutions are evolving to meet these demands, particularly for laboratories balancing speed, cost and operational complexity. Traditional culture methods can delay critical decisions, while PCR and ELISA often require significant capital investment, infrastructure changes and specialist training, creating barriers for low to medium-throughput operations.

Using Solus NanoFast™ Listeria as a practical example, the session will demonstrate how alternatives to culture, PCR, and ELISA can support next-day detection through simplified workflows that reduce training requirements and infrastructure changes. The discussion will also highlight how automated result interpretation and digital data management can improve consistency, traceability and audit readiness.

During the session, you will learn how to:

• Address common challenges in food and environmental Listeria monitoring
• Evaluate cost-effective alternatives to culture, PCR, and ELISA for low to medium-throughput testing (up to ~50 samples/day)
• Improve turnaround times without increasing workflow complexity
• Support audit readiness through objective results and digital traceability
• Align Listeria testing strategies with operational and regulatory requirements

Whether you’re overseeing environmental monitoring or finished product testing, this session will deliver practical insights to optimise Listeria testing workflows for efficiency, consistency and confidence in results. Don’t miss this opportunity to streamline your approach to food and environmental Listeria monitoring.

Presenter: Nathan Welch, Product Manager at PerkinElmer (Solus)

Nathan Welch brings over 25 years of expertise in food safety and quality assurance to the stage. His career spans diverse roles that have shaped his deep understanding of the industry. Starting with two years in a food testing contract laboratory, Nathan advanced into nine years specializing in culture media testing at Oxoid/Thermo Fisher, where he honed his technical and analytical skills.

He later transitioned into technical support at Thermo Fisher, providing critical guidance to clients and teams, before moving into product management, a role he has been in for the past 13 years, including nine years at Thermo Fisher and four years at Solus.

Presenter: Jean-Paul Anthony, Application Scientist at PerkinElmer (Solus)

J-P Anthony is the Applications Scientist for Solus/PerkinElmer contributing to training in the techniques and equipment for food pathogen testing. Prior to this he was a Senior Developmental Scientist and created many aspects of the enzyme and luminescent-based immunoassays including bacterial broth development from the time of the company’s inception in 2009. He trained in Immunology and Pharmacology at the University of Strathclyde before obtaining a PhD in novel drug discovery to combat protozoan parasitical infections at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.