New dishware sanitisers more effective at killing harmful bacteria

Ohio State University researchers tested two new dishware sanitisers, and found them to be more effective at removing bacteria from restaurant dishes than traditional sanitisers.

Melvin Pascall, co-author of the study, said that the two new sanitisers reflect the industry's recent efforts to develop more effective germ killers that are also environmentally friendly.

The two sanitisers - one carrying the name brand PROSAN and the other called neutral electrolysed oxidising water - not only proved more effective, but they also contained fewer toxic chemicals.

"Longer lasting sanitizers could be more cost effective for restaurants because they would not have to use nearly as much sanitising solution as they currently do," said Pascall.

He and his colleagues decided to compare the effectiveness of four different sanitisers by contaminating samples of milk and cream cheese with the highly infectious bacteria E. coli, and Listeria innocua.

They chose four sanitisers: PROSAN, a neutral electrolyzed oxidising water, an ammonia compound, and sodium hypochlorite.

The research team washed the dishes manually and by machine. Results indicated that the dishes washed by machine have consistently smaller amounts of the harmful bacteria on them, regardless of the sanitizers used.

Pascall and colleagues tested multiple dirty loads with the same batch of sanitiser to see how many loads they could wash and still have a 5-log reduction of bacteria.

"For both types of bacteria, the electrolysed water and PROSAN could wash more loads clean than the ammonia compound and the sodium hypochlorite.

Between the electrolyzed water and the PROSAN, they were equally as effective except for cleaning ceramic plates, where the electrolysed water was slightly more effective," said Pascall.

The findings were reported in the journal Food Control.