From Salmonella Detection to Prevention: How Nutreco Is Protecting Consumers and Mitigating a Potential €1M+ Impact
A customer testimonial from Nutreco Spain featuring Alfredo Corujo, MasterLab Director
When a Salmonella contamination event occurs, the challenge is rarely limited to identifying the pathogen. Understanding where it originated, how it spread, and how to prevent it from happening again is essential to protect consumers, strengthen food safety and limit the potential business impact of contamination.
For a global animal nutrition leader Nutreco, those answers are essential. Operating in more than 30 countries with around 100 production sites worldwide, Nutreco's mission of "Feeding the Future" relies on maintaining the highest standards of feed quality, animal health and food safety across a highly complex production chain.
To strengthen its Salmonella control strategy, Nutreco Spain implemented our GENE-UP® TYPER, our real time PCR typing solution that helps food producers to find, trace and understand Salmonella contamination event.
In this video interview, Alfredo Corujo, MasterLab Director at Nutreco Spain, shares how his team is using strain-level insights technology to move beyond traditional investigation methods and drive more proactive risk management.
A long-standing relationship focused on food safety
The relationship between Nutreco and bioMérieux began more than two decades ago.
Since then, the collaboration has continued to evolve alongside Nutreco's food safety and feed quality programs. Today, GENE-UP® TYPER plays a key role in helping the company better understand Salmonella persistence and transmission throughout the production chain.
Understanding more than presence or absence of Salmonella
Traditional pathogen testing answers an important question: Is Salmonella present? But for Nutreco, that information alone is often not enough: "GENE-UP® TYPER is a very key tool because [it enables] us information about the persistence of different Salmonella strains in different stages of production."
Going beyond simple detection and even beyond serotyping, GENE-UP® TYPER helps Nutreco differentiate between strains belonging to the same Salmonella serotype. This additional level of resolution provides valuable insights into contamination pathways, persistence patterns, and potential links between seemingly independent contamination events. More concretely, by distinguishing between strains, Nutreco can identify whether contamination events are linked, determine where persistence may be occurring, and prioritize corrective actions more effectively.
As Alfredo Corujo explains: "We can identify critical control points to prioritize our intervention in order to solve the problem."
2 concrete examples
One of the most powerful aspects of strain typing is its ability to reveal connections that would otherwise remain difficult to find.
Example 1: Connecting the dots between two distant farms
The first example concerns the investigation conducted by Nutreco into a Salmonella contamination in two layer farms located approximately 200 kilometers apart.
At first glance, the contamination events appeared unrelated. However, GENE-UP® TYPER revealed and confirmed that both sites were affected by the same Salmonella Enteritidis strain.
"We detected two different layer farms, 200 kilometers apart, contaminated with the same Salmonella Enteritidis serotypes."
The investigation ultimately uncovered weaknesses related to biosecurity practices and personnel movement between sites. As a result, farms revised their internal biosecurity procedures to reduce the risk of future transmission.
"From this information, the layer intervention modified their internal biosecurity rules in order to prevent or avoid this kind of contamination."
For Nutreco in this example, the value wasn't simply detecting the contamination. It was understanding why it happened and taking action to prevent recurrence.
Example 2: Revealing hidden Salmonella transmission pathways: from feed ingredient to one-day-old chicks
Another example highlighted the traceability power of strain-level analysis.
Nutreco identified Salmonella in soybean meal used within the production chain. Using GENE-UP® TYPER, the team was able to demonstrate that the same strain was later found in breeder flocks and ultimately in day-old chicks through vertical transmission.
"We were able to track and trace the contamination from raw material to one-day-old chickens."
This level of insight enabled the company to pinpoint the source and understand the contamination pathway from ingredient to final animal production. For organizations managing complex production systems, such visibility can be a real game changer.
Beyond food safety: preventing a potential €1 Million+ impact
Food safety incidents carry significant economic consequences. When contamination remains undetected or misunderstood, the impact can quickly extend beyond operational disruption to product losses, recalls, customer confidence, and regulatory challenges.
According to Alfredo Corujo, one investigation alone may have helped avoid losses exceeding €1 Million.
For Nutreco, advanced Salmonella typing is therefore not only a food safety tool. It is also a business protection tool.
Looking ahead: towards more proactive Salmonella control
Finally, Nutreco sees strain typing as a foundation for a future where food safety decisions become increasingly proactive. To support this vision, Nutreco plans to combine GENE-UP® TYPER with ENVIROMAP®, bringing together environmental monitoring data and strain-level intelligence to improve decision-making across production systems.
"In the future, GENE-UP® TYPER will give us [the ability] to move from reactive investigation to proactive Salmonella reassessment."
- The objective is clear: transform data into actionable prevention strategies and strengthen Salmonella control throughout the entire chain.
ENVIROMAP® is a secure, cloud-based system that allows you to automate your environmental monitoring program and assists with the entire sampling lifecycle.
Watch the full customer story
Hear directly from Alfredo Corujo, MasterLab Director at Nutreco Spain, and learn more about the impact and value of GENE-UP® TYPER on Nutreco's Salmonella control program.
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Just like Nutreco, you, too, can improve your Salmonella detection. Reach out to our teams to learn how and find the best solution for you:
