Microbiological status of vegan ground meat products from German retail

The microbiological status of 10 raw plant-based ground meat products was assessed to obtain insight into contamination levels and the types of bacteria present in these meat analogues. The total bacterial counts at the end of the best before date varied greatly from below 1.0 log 10 CFU/g to 8.31 log 10 CFU/g, while the median count was 3.89 log 10 CFU/g. For each product, the lactic acid bacterial counts were similar, although generally between ca. 0.5 and 1 log 10 lower than the total bacterial counts, indicating that lactic acid bacteria were a majority in the microbiota of these products. While the median counts of toxigenic pathogens were generally very low (