AbstractA diverse field of predictive microbiology models has emerged in the past 30 years and has advanced our understanding of microbial behavior in foods. As most of published models have for objective to provide operationally relevant information to decision makers, predictive microbiology models have now found their place within both the academic, and the food industrial communities.Given the importance of these models to food safety, the decision makers are in need of evidence-based advices in order to assess confidence in the predictions provided by models they use. The objectives of this work were (i) to review current approaches in predictive microbiology used to build, verify and validate models, and (ii) to propose a categorization scheme that would tend to define a model's viability for use in an operational setting.