Microbial Product - Membrane Filtration

Microbial Retention and Integrity Testing for Food & Beverage Filters

Protecting your food and beverage production from pathogens and/or spoilers is mission-critical to ensure product quality that protects your brand. A key task of final membrane filters is to remove contaminants and provide microbiologically stable finished product.

Final membrane filters available in the marketplace offer a wide variety of microbial retention performance which is critical to understand. Parameters such as microorganisms for challenge testing, challenge level and type of performance claims are sometimes misunderstood.

Food & Beverage manufacturers with strong HACCP programs monitor final filters with an integrity testing method that provides assurance of filter performance in the customer’s process. This non-destructive integrity testing is directly correlated to the ability of a filter to retain microorganisms.  

Integrity testing helps manufacturers avoid issues such as product contamination, product losses, reprocessing and production delays, as well as satisfying auditor requirements for critical microorganism reducing/removing steps.

In our webcast, “Microbial Product Stability Using Membrane Filtration”, you’ll learn:

• How final membrane filtration protects your product quality
• How integrity tests confirm microbial reduction and sterilizing capabilities of filters
• How selection of a filter affects risk of contamination

Speakers

Joseph Baaklini

Director, SLS Laboratory and Food & Beverage

Pall Corporation

Joseph Baaklini is the Director of SLS Global Technical Support group for Pall Corporation leading the Laboratory and Food & Beverage technical division globally.

Since 2010, Joseph has been providing field customer support and filtration optimization solutions to the Food and Beverage market segment.  

Joseph has over 18 years of experience in the Food and Beverage industry in applications such as Product Development, Flavor Formulation and Process Development. Joseph held the position of Technical Manager at Finlay Tea Solution, NJ. He was Senior Process Technologist at Firmenich, NJ where he was inventor on flavor patents.

Joseph has a B.Sc. degree in Food Science from Rutgers University.

Ursula Brendel-Thimmel

Director, Food and Beverage Laboratories (SLS)

Pall Corporation

Ursula Brendel-Thimmel is the Director of Scientific and Laboratory Services at the Pall Center of Excellence for Food and Beverages in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Her key areas of expertise include sterile and microorganism reducing filtration in liquids and gases, validation and qualification of filter for the application in the food and beverage industry, and test methods for depth and membrane filter in different geometries from laboratory up to process scale.

Ursula has over 37 years of experience in the filtration industry including QC Microbiologist and Head of Quality Control at Seitz Filter Werke, Laboratory Service Center Manager at MEMTEC, Laboratory Service Center Manager at USF and Senior Lab Manager at Pall Corporation. 

Ursula has a Dipl. Ing. (TU) Food Technology degree from Technical University of Munich/ Weihenstepha.