Microbial contamination of food is cause of economic losses for the food industry and may often lead to emerging
disease risks for the consumers. Today microbial contamination is screened by the industries through postproduction
storage of the food packages in large incubators for two weeks. For this reason, simpler, faster and low
cost analytical techniques, like the EN, can be a big advantage for the food industry. Previous works [1,2] have
demonstrated that the EN is capable of early diagnosing microbial contamination in different food matrices through
the detection of volatile secondary metabolites produced by the organisms during their growth.
The objective of this work was to investigate whether the EN is capable of performing reliable detection of
Enterobacter hormaechei in vegetable soups in at least 24 hours at low concentrations. If so, the benefit that could
bring the electronic nose within the industry is huge considering the time of analysis commonly used for the
screening of products.