**4.3 Bringing the sample to the laboratory and acceptance**

The sample taken from the enterprise should be brought to the laboratory as cleared from all conditions that will increase or decrease the single microorganism count as soon as possible and analyzed.

In microbiologically stable products such as sterile, dry and humid resistant packages, no cooling is required during transportation. On the other hand, unprocessed, cooled, pasteurized, spoiled foods should be transported between 0°C and +4°C and frozen products should be transported at -18°C and those bulged (or having a risk of bulge) should be packaged separately against explosion and leakage and brought to the laboratory.

First, the sample should be accepted to be analyzed by the laboratory. For this acceptance, laboratory personnel should control whether the sample is brought to the laboratory under required conditions; if such personnel is sure that the sample was brought under standard conditions, she/he should accept the sample for the analysis; otherwise she/he should either reject or write all negativities related with this to the acceptance form.

For the sample which has come to the laboratory and accepted, date of acceptance, time of acceptance, all information related with the product (date of production, package features, batch number, shift number, time of sampling, temperature of sampling, temperature of arrival etc. if required) should be recorded according to the features of the laboratory.

Frozen liquid products are not accepted for microbiological or somatic cell analysis. If chemical tests will be performed, sub-samples should be separated for microbiological analysis first.
