July 12 - Warnex Inc. announced today that U.S.-based West Liberty Foods, L.L.C. ("West Liberty"), a major manufacturer of ready-to-eat meats, including turkey, beef, pork and chicken products, has signed on to use Warnex's Genevision(TM) Rapid Pathogen Detection system to monitor the safety of its products. Under the terms of the agreement, West Liberty will purchase Genevision equipment to test for the presence of Salmonella and Listeria.
"West Liberty Foods, as a leading food manufacturer and a major supplier to corporations such as Subway(R), Denny's(R), and Wal-Mart(R), understands the need for a rapid and precise food safety testing solution," said Mark Busgang, President and CEO of Warnex. "To have a sense of West Liberty's scale of operations, it supplies to the Subway(R) chain of restaurants alone more than one million pounds of meat products each week."
The state-of-the-art Genevision(TM) system uses Real-Time PCR technology to rapidly and accurately determine the presence of pathogens in a given food sample. The system allows for the simultaneous detection of multiple pathogens and processing of samples within 24 to 48 hours, a significant improvement over traditional microbiology tests that currently require 5 to 7 days. The Genevision system also includes the custom Sentinel(TM) software that analyzes the results and allows for immediate reporting throughout an organization.
"Assuring product safety is an integral part of the production process, and the Genevision technology provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to increase the safety of our products and dramatically decrease the time it takes to test for the presence of pathogens," said Dr. Charles Cook, Vice-President, Strategic Development, of West Liberty Foods. "The adoption of Genevision will enable us to move our safety testing in-house and provide us with significant operational efficiencies."
The current annual worldwide market to test for food-borne pathogens is estimated at $5 billion. With the recent U.S. regulatory validations of the Genevision tests by the AOAC Research Institute, Warnex is well positioned to expand its commercial penetration.
