microbial contamination and spoilage.Numerous growth monitoring studies have been conducted to analyze bacterial growth in culture media under various environmental conditions (Baev et al. 2006, Bannenberg et al. 2021. However, analyses of growth in culture media typically fail to replicate real-life situations because they are not necessarily valid to reflect the environments that the bacteria encounter in food products. Thus, it is necessary to conduct comprehensive analyses of bacterial growth in different foods to assess the influence of the different constituents, properties of food (e.g., pH, water activity, salts, organic acids, and preservatives), and storage conditions (e.g., temperature, relative humidity, and atmosphere), as well as various combinations of these factors.Despite being generally used for the enumeration JARQ 56 (4), 321-327 (2022) https://www.jircas.go.jp