NFOK22000U Microbiological Food Safety and Quality: Control, Cases and Practicals

Volume 2024/2025
Education

MSc Programme in Food Science and Technology 

Content

The course has relevance to everyone interested in microbial food safety and food hygiene.

Avoiding microbial spoilage and ensuring food safety is neccessary in food processing and storage in order to avoid waste and optimize our use of resources as well as to maintain our health. 

This course aims to provide the students with the most current knowledge within food safety and hygiene as well as providing the students with competences to maintain an up-to-date knowledge in the future.

As it is envisioned that this course will attract students with different academic backgrounds, there will be an initial brush-up on central topics, to facilitate an improved learning outcome for the remaining part of the course. 

Learning Outcome

The purpose of the course is to provide an understanding of microbial food safety and hygiene in the entire production chain and to provide tools to identify and solve problems pertinent to food safety and hygiene. 

Upon completion the students should be able to:

Knowledge

  • Describe the principles behind detection of food borne pathogens (monitoring, sampling and detection methods) 
  • Describe the common preservation principles 
  • Have insight in the elements and tools in predictive microbiology 
  • Understand the application of advanced biological intervention strategies. 
  • Understand the interplay between safe foods and sustainable food production

 

Skills

  • Identify and characterize common infectious agents and toxins of relevance to food safety, including the risk they pose for human health. 
  • Work in the laboratory with selected experimental techniques that are applied in food safety.
  • Use relevant software for monitoring, predicting, and preventing microbial food hazards.

 

Competences

  • Use principles and methods for identifying and solving problems of importance to food safety.
  • Investigate and predict microbiological safety and quality problems 
  • Evaluate basic food hygiene programmes from the processing steps to the consumer 
  • Evaluate the extent to which existing and novel interventions strategies are fulfilling current legislation.
  • Cooperate with technical staff and fellow students on setting up, performing and evaluating laboratory experiments to address food safety issues.
Literature

See Absalon for a list of course literature. 

Reviews and scientific papers will be used.

For basic background knowledge, most updated Food Microbiology books can be used.

The main part of the course will consist of three parts, i) lectures on selected topics, ii) practical lab-exercises and iii) theoretical cases where students will be introduced to “real-life” problems, analyze the problems, and come up with a solution that is both safe and sustainable.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 36
  • Class Instruction
  • 20
  • Theory exercises
  • 30
  • Practical exercises
  • 30
  • Project work
  • 70
  • Guidance
  • 19
  • Exam
  • 1
  • Total
  • 206
Oral
Individual
Collective
Credit
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination, 30 min
Type of assessment details
Oral examination, 30 min without preparation.
The student will draw a lab-report and a case report from the course. The student will present the content of these reports followed by overall questions from the course curriculum
Exam registration requirements

Lab-reports must be approved. Case reports must be approved. 

Aid
All aids allowed
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
No external censorship
several internal examiners
Re-exam

Same as ordinary. Lab and Case reports must be approved 2 weeks before examination. 

 

Criteria for exam assesment

See learning outcome