This European prestandard provides the general terminology related to quality assurance of the preparation of culture media and specifies the minimum requirements to be used for the microbiological analysis of products intended for human consumption or animal feeding.

These requirements are applicable to three categories of culture media used in laboratories that prepare and/or use culture media for performing microbiological analyses :

• commercially manufactured ready-to-use media ;
• media prepared from commercially available dehydrated formulations (either complete e.g. plate count agar or basal media to which supplements are added e.g. Baird-Parker agar) ;
• media prepared from its individual components.