Yeastswere isolated only from 31.1% of the environmental samples.
They belonged to six different species of which five of them were
isolated from the meat samples too. Yeasts occurred only in 11.8% of
the air samples taken from the production facility compared to their
occurrence in 35.4% of other environmental samples. This low
occurrence of yeasts in the air of the production facility is in
agreement with previously reported results from food processing
plants (Viljoen and Greyling,1995; Nielsen et al., 2008). Debaryomyces
hansenii dominated the environmental samples with a 62.6%
contribution followed by pigmented yeast species R. glutinis (22.0%).
Even if C. zeylanoides was the second most frequently isolated species
from meat samples, its isolation from environmental samples was
sporadic compared to the relatively consistent occurrence of D.
hansenii and R. glutinis (Table 1).