Microbiologist swabs fresh and leftover pizza for bacteria growth with shocking results

A microbiologist has revealed the shocking amount of bacteria lurking on takeaway pizza after swabbing both fresh and day-old slices.

Nick Aicher, who works as a senior quality control analyst, regularly goes viral sharing clips testing the cleanliness of various everyday items with his 450,000 TikTok followers.

In a recent clip, he tested the amount of bacterial growth on a pepperoni pizza shortly after purchase, plus leftover the day before, with baffling results.

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Starting the experiment, Nick unveils a large half-cheese, half-pepperoni takeaway pizza and uses a swab to get a sample from each side.

The next morning, he swabbed slices leftover from the night before, and used the swabs to transfer the sample onto petri dishes, which he labelled.

These are stored in an incubator, with Nick going back at a later time to check on them.

There, he finds the fresh cheese slice is “spotless”, though the sample taken from the fresh slice of pepperoni appears to have significant bacterial growth.

He then checks the older slices, and finds that the cheese slice “got a lil bit of yuck”, with visible bacterial growth in the petri dish.

Bizarrely, the older slice of pepperoni actually has less bacteria than the fresh piece – something Nick can’t explain.

But the results didn’t seem to sway his followers.

One viewer commented: “I’m still eating it.”

“A pepperoni is super salty and that’s why pepperoni can exist right out on the shelf at the grocery store. bacteria don’t like salt,” another user guessed.

Someone else wrote: “Sooo the grease from the pepperoni is what’s making bacteria grow? Cause how? And I’m still eating day old pizza out the box idc [I don’t care].”

“I thought it would be fun for people to know all the little nastiness that we don’t think about every day,” the Chicago-based content creator told What’s The Jam of why he shares his experiments online.

Nick previously made headlines after putting the ‘five second rule’ of dropped food to the test, monitoring the bacterial growth on food after it had been on the floor for various time periods.

He found that, whether the food has been on the floor for five seconds of 60, “it’ll be nasty either way” – advising against the practice.

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