Best practice tips for selecting a prepared media supplier

What does a good supplier look like? Andrew Ramage, Microbiology Product Specialist at Cherwell Laboratories, advises how to take the guesswork out of the search.

Researching potential suppliers is, of course, essential, but where do you start with understanding what a good supplier looks like? There are many factors to consider - from their media manufacture processes, storage and transport to their depth of technical knowledge, and the kind of relationship you can expect to nurture.

Best practice tips for finding suppliers:

Once you have your own criteria mapped out, here are the key questions for your shortlisted potential suppliers:

Cherwell Laboratories, specialist suppliers of products for environmental monitoring and process validation, has published an eBook: The Pharmaceutical and Cleanroom Industry’s Pocket Guide to Prepared Culture Media. The guide, which is intended for anyone involved in using and/or buying microbiological media, aims to provide an understanding of the best practices and breadth of prepared culture media options for varying applications within the pharmaceutical and cleanroom industry.

The comprehensive guide equips the reader with all the information they need to consider in order to produce; purchase; store and use prepared media effectively. Focusing on the key topics covered in the guide will help readers to ensure their culture media is of a consistently high quality to deliver reliable results that they can be confident of, every time.

Topics within the guide include: an overview of the various applications of prepared media; best practice guidelines for handling and storing prepared media; the logistics of in-house prepared media manufacture; the argument for pre-prepared media versus in-house manufacturing and guidelines on how to choose a prepared media supplier.

Commenting on the eBook, Andrew Ramage says: “I hope this booklet will educate and inform the reader of the many considerations needed to manufacture high-quality microbiological growth media. A flexible and reliable manufacturer of prepared media will be able to guarantee the customer receives exactly the product they require, to a consistently high standard. Once the reader has finished reading this booklet they should also have a clearer understanding of the pros and cons of buying in prepared media versus manufacturing in-house.”