With water being an essential ingredient in most home and personal care products, its quality can determine the quality of your products. If you are not testing your water systems regularly you could miss lurking harmful organisms like Burkholderia cepacia (B. cepacia). Since B. cepacia is a waterborne microorganism, this contaminant can be a reoccurring problem in your facility.
Routine facility testing paired with accurate microbial identification of environmental isolates are essential because it catalogs routine flora in the facility and allows quality control professionals to detect and analyse any deviations.
Lack of data regarding the state of control of your water system poses a potential risk of missing objectionable microbial contamination getting into your products. Although routine water system monitoring is not required in cosmetics, water remains one of the top contamination sources found in manufacturing, so it is important that you are testing your system using validated methods on a regular basis.
Any time part of your facility is offline due to a microbial contamination, it equates to lost profits. If the contamination arose from your water system, no amount of cleaning the manufacturing vessels will solve the problem because that is not the origin of the contaminant. An accurate species level identification can help link the microorganism source.
The relative cost of accurate microbial IDs is small especially compared to the loss of inventory or, worst case, the cost of a recall. With an environmental monitoring (EM) program in place, you can reduce the risk of this happening. EM programs will have you screening your water and other parts of your facility regularly and will serve as an early warning system that will save you time and money with faster and more effective contamination control.
