Spiral Biotech, Inc. first commercialized the technique of spiral plating in 1976. Since that time, the company has focused on automating the pre-analytical and analytical steps involved with traditional microbial enumeration. Spiral plating automatically prepares up to a four-fold sample dilution without the need for time-consuming manual pipeting, while significantly increasing repeatability and accuracy. The resulting plates are much more accurately counted using manual methods, or Spiral Biotech's newest colony counting system - QCount®. A single technician can count more than 400 plates per hour using the QCount system.