Current Status and Future Trends in Campylobacter Detection and Quantification Across the Food Production Continuum

Campylobacter spp., particularly Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli, remain the leading bacterial causes of foodborne gastroenteritis worldwide, with poultry serving as the dominant reservoir and additional transmission routes involving livestock, raw milk, water, fresh produce, and food-processing environments. Accurate detection and quantification are essential for risk assessment, process hygiene monitoring, outbreak investigation, and One Health surveillance; however, reliable measurement is complicated by the organism’s fastidious microaerophilic growth requirements, stress sensitivity, low or uneven distribution in complex matrices, and ability to enter viable but non-culturable (VBNC) states. This review examines current and emerging approaches for Campylobacter detection and quantification across the food production continuum, including pre-harvest, harvest and processing, post-harvest, and retail, as well as consumer-level settings. Conventional culture, colony-count enumeration, most probable number (MPN) methods, and immunological assays are compared with molecular approaches, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR), qPCR, digital PCR, viability PCR, whole-genome sequencing, metagenomics, biosensors, microfluidics, and artificial intelligence-assisted surveillance. Regulatory and standardization frameworks, including the International Organization of Standards (ISO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Department of Agriculture-Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS), and European Union (EU) process hygiene criteria are discussed, together with One Health surveillance systems. Overall, future Campylobacter monitoring will require integrated, matrix-specific strategies that combine standardized culture-based enumeration, viability-informed molecular quantification, genomic source attribution, and harmonized metadata to support more rapid, accurate, and risk-based food-safety decision-making.