LuminaDairy
Pasteurized once. Exposed from there to the pack.
The pasteurizer is the kill step. After it, cheese, ice cream and powders can pick up whatever lives on the fillers, brine systems, freezers and dryers they pass. Lumina is the record of that environment: live today for the swab results, checks and issues on your floor, with a line-side sensor in build.
The gap
Listeria lives in the cold, wet rooms after the pasteurizer.
Contamination after pasteurization comes from the environment: drains, condensate, brine systems, freezer and filler parts. A swab plan samples it in turns, and the result comes back days later.
A dairy plant that exposes ready-to-eat product to the environment after pasteurization runs environmental monitoring under 21 CFR 117. The industry's own guidance targets Listeria and Salmonella, and Cronobacter where powders are made. Grade "A" milk plants meet the same preventive-controls requirements through the Grade "A" Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), inspected by state milk regulators.
Most of the cost is the reaction. A positive brings vector swabs, intensified sanitation and, on a food-contact surface, product held for results. In a study of small and medium dairy plants, corrective actions were most of what environmental monitoring cost in its first year.
71–100%
of first-year environmental monitoring spend in seven of nine small and medium dairy plants (Motzer et al., JDS Communications, 2025).
$19.35M
in criminal penalties and a civil settlement after one ice cream maker's 2015 Listeria outbreak, which sickened 10 people and killed 3 (US Department of Justice, May 2020; CDC).
1 in 4
of recalls estimated to cost more than $30 million (GMA, Capturing Recall Costs, 2011, 36 respondents).
Live today
The record of a dairy plant, before a sensor is mounted.
- 01
Swab results, pinned where they were taken
Listeria, Enterobacteriaceae and ATP results parsed from lab reports, matched to the sample and pinned to the site it came from. A positive files an issue by itself, with an owner and a due date.
- 02
Pasteurizer and CIP checks with a range
The daily pasteurizer checks your operators record by hand (indicating against recording thermometer, chart change, diversion), CIP concentrations and temperatures, and cooler readings, each with the range it should stay in. The recording chart stays your legal record.
- 03
Holds and positives, on the clock
A presumptive, a failed check or product held for a result becomes an issue: what is held, why, who owns it and when it closed.
- 04
Your plan, cited
Your food safety plan, Listeria control program, SSOPs, 21 CFR 117 and the Grade "A" PMO in the Library. Ask answers only from them, cites the passage, and says so when they cannot support an answer.
Live on the web and in the mobile app (iOS and Android), offline included. Not yet deployed at a plant. We're looking for the design partners who will run it first.
In build
A sensor for the surfaces between your samples.
Lumina Detect is a line-side sensor, lab-demonstrated and in build, designed to read pathogen-risk signatures off a surface in milliseconds and tell your program where the next swab should go.
- 01
After the pasteurizer
Fillers, cheese-handling surfaces, conveyors, and the floors and drains around them. Designed to mount on its own bracket beside the line, with no PLC integration.
- 02
Pre-operational inspection
Designed to give the pre-op inspection a reading of the surfaces a flashlight misses, and to flag one that did not come clean. The startup call stays with QA.
- 03
Sites that keep coming back
A harborage site shows itself as a spot that reads elevated shift after shift, on the surfaces the sensor can see. Designed to surface that pattern early, pinned to the spot on the floor plan. Harborage inside equipment stays a job for the swab.
A surface measurement: food-contact and adjacent surfaces, not the inside of the product, read as risk signatures at colony scale, not single cells. Listeria is in active development and in the validation plan, with dairy soils part of it. Confirmatory testing stays the record of your program, and a sensor flag is never a release criterion. See how the sensor works →
Design partners
Bring one line after the pasteurizer, its swab plan and the person who owns them. We will build the record around them.
No fee during the pilot, and converting is your decision on the measured result. The post-pilot price is in writing before it starts.