Food safety: physicists and biologists join forces to defeat bacteria

Improving hygiene in the agri-food industry and thus enhancing food safety for the public:
this major social challenge is at the heart of an interdisciplinary research project, at the crossroads of fluid mechanics and microbiology. Five years of collaboration have produced conclusive results at both theoretical and practical levels, leading to the development of more effective and environmentally-friendly cleaning procedures.

At a time when public concerns about public health are being voiced loud and clear, not least because of the numerous food-borne epidemics linked to pathogen-contaminated equipment surfaces, the agri-food industry is faced with a number of hygiene challenges. One of these is cleaning production lines more effectively. However, it is not always easy to remove micro-organisms that have settled on a surface, even using specific detergents, because some bacteria develop on all types of materials and resist intensive cleaning.

Keen to make progress in this area, a number of research teams submitted an application that was accepted and funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) from 2019 to 2024. Called FEFS (Fluid Engineering for Food Safety), the project uses fluid mechanics to improve food safety.

The aim? To propose innovative solutions to improve cleaning and reduce the risk of contamination. To achieve this, we had to identify the conditions under which cleaning is effective and gain a better understanding of the interactions between bacteria and the surfaces on which they grow, particularly when these surfaces are drying.