The food's safety record should travel with the food.
It starts in your plant, and that part is live today: lab results, checks, readings and corrective actions in one record, written as the work happens, even with no signal. Next comes a suite of proprietary sensors, so the record is measured, not only typed. The first, built to read contamination off a surface, is lab‑demonstrated and in build.
4–6 days
Swab collection to a confirmed result.
FSIS MLG Appendix 3.08
2027
From early 2027, FSIS inspectors swab ready-to-eat plant surfaces with every routine product sample.
FSIS Constituent Update, September 18, 2026
1 in 4
Recalls estimated to cost over $30 million.
GMA, Capturing Recall Costs, 2011 (36 respondents)
$27B
Spent worldwide on food-safety testing in 2025.
IMARC, Food Safety Testing Market, 2026
The status quo
Today's plants catch failures late, on paper, or not at all.
Every failure on a line starts small: a colony, a residue, a late start nobody logged.
- 01
The blind spot
A confirmed result takes 4–6 days. By then the product is in the supply chain, and some of it has been eaten.
- 02
The coverage gap
A swab is one point at one moment. Between swabs, the surfaces of a running line are dark.
- 03
Three recollections
A late start, a hold and a stop each have an owner, a clock and a cost, and no system everyone shares keeps the record.
- 04
Slow, manual response
Investigations written by hand, after the fact. Nobody can say how long the exposure lasted.
- 05
Indefensible records
Lab results, SOPs and logs in disconnected systems that do not tell one story when an inspector asks.
More swabs won't fix a broken system. We need a system built for prevention.
How it works
One approach, made three times.
Read without disrupting. Own the record from the moment it is created.
- 1 Floor plan and flow
- 2 Four systems need attention
- 3 Test positivity rate
- 01
Lumina Platform
One record of the plant, written as the work happens.
Samples, lab results, issues, tasks, forms, readings and the documents that govern them. On the web and on the floor, over the LIMS and document system you already run.
Live today - 02
Lumina Observe
Instrument what no system captures.
Lumina would look for mistakes, not workers. When a food-safety rule your plant wrote is broken, it would show you where, so someone can fix it. It would track the seat, never the person in it.
Exploring with prospective partners - 03
Lumina Detect
Read what no instrument could.
A proprietary line-side sensor built to read a surface in milliseconds and tell your program where the next swab should go.
Lab-demonstrated · in build
Three lines, one program: one hardware toolkit underneath, so a new product is a module swap, not a new program.
Lumina places no hold, releases nothing, stops no line and schedules no crew. It records who did, when, and on what evidence. Confirmatory laboratory testing stays the record of your program, and a sensor flag is never a release criterion. See how we draw that line →
Who it is for
One record, read three ways.
Quality, operations and finance each get the answer they need.
-
Quality
Your EMP and your lab stay the program of record.
- Every result on the map, with that site's history beside it, before the weekly meeting.
- A positive opens an issue with the corrective action, root cause, owner and due date attached.
- Every entry time-stamped, attributed, versioned and exportable.
What you say to the inspector: here is the record, and here is who closed it.
See the platform -
Operations
Nothing in Lumina stops your line, holds product or gates your start.
- Every late start, hold and stop logged from the floor with its cause. Line checks and calibration logs off the clipboard.
- One clock for production, sanitation and QA: who saw it, when, and who closed it.
- A mobile app (iOS and Android) that works in the rooms with no signal.
When the District, your customer or a lawyer asks what you knew and when, the answer is in one place: the hold, the late hand-over, the stop, each with a name, a time and the evidence.
Day one on the floor -
Finance
Food safety is six lines on the P&L, and each one has a unit.
- One license per facility, no per‑seat fees. No fee during the pilot, and the post-pilot price in writing before it starts.
- No payback figure we did not measure with you. Most plants approve this as a compliance and record decision.
- What we measure with you: late-start minutes by cause, pounds held, days to disposition, re-cleans per week.
What you say in the budget meeting: this is what a held day costs us, and this is who decides.
The business case
By market
The same record, a different pressure wherever food is made.
Ready-to-eat and dairy plants answer for Listeria in the environment. Poultry and beef plants answer for pathogens on the product. Kitchens and restaurants answer for time and temperature, and for the records that show it.
-
Ready-to-eat
Listeria, on every surface FSIS now looks at.
Every swab, positive and corrective action in one record, as FSIS reports all Listeria species and, from early 2027, swabs your surfaces.
For ready-to-eat plants -
Poultry
Salmonella on product, and the interventions dosed against it.
Rinse and parts results, intervention checks, holds and line stops in one record, with a sensor in build for the surfaces between samples.
For poultry plants -
Beef
STEC in trim, where one surface becomes many lots.
N60 results, intervention readings and the holds that need a decision in one record, with a sensor in build for fabrication and trim surfaces.
For beef plants -
Dairy
Listeria in the cold, wet rooms after the pasteurizer.
Swab results, pasteurizer and CIP checks, and positives in one record, with a sensor in build for the surfaces after pasteurization.
For dairy plants -
Foodservice and catering
Six hours to cool, recorded by hand.
Cooking, cooling and holding logs as forms on a phone that works with no signal, and every record findable when the auditor asks.
For kitchens and caterers -
QSR
One name over every supplier and restaurant.
Restaurant checks, supplier documents and incidents in one record, live today for a restaurant or central kitchen, with the view across every location next.
For restaurant brands
The P&L
Most of what food safety costs is booked somewhere else.
Quality sits on the critical path for every new customer, supplier and product a plant takes on. Its cost lands in six places, and only one of them is labeled food safety.
- 01
Product on hold Working capital
- 02
Product shipped at risk Corporate contingency
- 03
Line downtime Variance
- 04
Sanitation spend and re-cleans Operating cost
- 05
Compliance labor Labor and fees
- 06
Audit exposure Revenue deduction
$36.6M
at one processor: $21.0M in returns, $7.4M in write-offs, $6.5M in plant shutdown, $1.7M in logistics.
~15 months
before the same processor could book the insurance recovery on its previous recall.
$130K–$2.4M
sales value of a day's output at an FSIS large deli or hot-dog plant, at one processor's net sales per pound. A hold ties it up; it is a loss only if destroyed or sold at a discount.
$50,000
what one mid-size processor pays a consultant, once a year, to read its documents.
Figures from filings and stated spend; none is a Lumina result. In the only industry survey on record (GMA, Capturing Recall Costs, 2011, 36 respondents), about one in four recalls was estimated to cost over $30 million. Sources: TreeHouse Foods Form 10-K (recall components; insurance recovery timing); FSIS Listeria size bands (50,001 to 600,000+ lb/day) and Hormel Foods FY2025 Form 10-K net sales per pound, Retail and Foodservice ($2.59–$3.93, our arithmetic). The $50,000 is one account's stated spend, not a market average.
One license per facility, no per‑seat fees. No fee during the pilot. The post-pilot price in writing before it starts.
See the business caseAcross your plants
What one plant learns should reach the others.
The person over twenty plants needs to know which one to worry about, and a fix found at one plant should not wait for the next audit to reach the rest.
- 01
Every plant logs the same way
Your forms, issue fields and documents are set once for the company, so every plant logs a check or a positive the same way, and the numbers mean the same thing everywhere.
Live today - 02
Which plant to worry about
One view across plants: positives, open issues and overdue corrective actions side by side, ranked by where the risk is, and a fix found at one plant flagged to the plants that run the same line.
Next
Across companies, our agreements are written to let Lumina train its own models on de‑identified data, never a third party's. Benchmarks between companies come later, once enough plants take part that none can be identified.
Where it goes
One record, made at every place the food passes through.
Direction, not a product: today the record exists at one node, the plant. Everything past it is being built.
Five nodes on one line: plant, distribution center, truck, store and kitchen. The plant is lit; the rest are outlines.
- Plant Live, on demo data
- Distribution center Not built
- Truck Not built
- Store Not built
- Kitchen Not built
Every party in the chain keeps its own record of its own step and hands the next one a document. Lumina is building the network that holds one record across the chain, and a sensor to add to it: the plant's entry will be a measurement taken as the line ran, not a claim typed afterward.
The plant is step one. The record is worth something to the QA tech, more to the plant manager, more again to the person who owns twenty plants, and most of all to the retailer at the end of the chain, who bears every consequence of a failure and owns none of the data that would prevent one.
Operator voices
Plant operators are describing the system we are building.
I do like the way that it's working and the ease of it. Because the thing of it is, the platforms that we're using, it's kind of time consuming.
Right now we've got to go look at paperwork, and there's more times than we were probably comfortable with that we question the decisions [the QA techs] made after the fact. This is going to force them to make the right decision.
We're wasting money for the worst-case scenario. If real-time feedback could lower overall concentrations, we could target intervention only where it's actually needed.
The platform
Everything the plant knows, in one record.
Nothing stays open because everyone forgot. What your best people know does not retire with them. When an auditor asks for the record, it already exists.
A live floor map, lab PDFs parsed as they land, issues that open themselves, a mobile app that works with no signal.