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Wood is a direct food contact material used in the food industry since ancestral times. In Europe, wooden food contact surfaces are subject to the European regulation n°1935/2004, which specifies that food contact material must not interfere with foodstuff characteristics (Anonymous, 2004).
Today, no standard recovery method was defined for wooden food contact surface. Therefore, it might be important to provide an efficient method to quantify the microbial load on the wooden surfaces in direct contact with food.

The aim of this study was to compare three methods of recovering microorganisms from wooden surfaces: grinding, brushing and planning (Ismaïl et al., 2014).

Three microorganisms, well-known as risk along the food chain, were tested: Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli and Penicillium expansum. We chose three wooden species - pine, poplar and spruce - which are mainly used to manufacture wooden packaging. We analyzed the influence of wooden moisture content, contact time and wood timbers on microbial recovery rates.

We identified that factors cited above influenced the microbial recovery rates from wooden surfaces. Grinding was the most reliable method with the best recovery yield: 30.1 % for Listeria monocytogenes on spruce and Escherichia coli on poplar, and 30.4% for Penicillium expansum on poplar. Planing was chosen to be applied to thicker wooden as cheese ripening shelves and tested, then, for analyzing the microbial load of 54 various wooden ripening shelves. We did not found common pathogens known as risks for dairy products. Our results suggest that wood is suitable for food contact.