ABSTRACT
In Australia, automated techniques have not generally been adopted, mainly because of the high cost and the unavailability of technical support. Automated monitoring of Critical Control Point and automated control of plant operations need special attention in the future. Plant operations, generally, are coming increasingly under computer control. Efforts at automating food microbiology seem to have been directed almost exclusively toward microbiological analysis and simply at providing more rapid or less labor-intensive substitutes for parts of plate count methods. They depend on actually following the development of those microbial parameters considered important in a given product until enough information is acquired to make useful predictions. Others would argue that automated methods must compete with traditional ones only on immediate merit; they should not need special assistance. Beyond it, only the hydrophobic grid-membrane filter seems to have real potential for "automated" versions of traditional microbiological analysis.
