Both Chinese GB nutrient agar and American FDA standard method agar are commonly used for counting bacteria in food inspection. A number of our experiments showed that the count of bacteria by FDA standard method agar is 23.9% higher than that by GB nutrient agar. The present C8 medium is an improved medium based on the composition of the two media mentioned above The result of our comparison experiment showed that the C8 medium used for counting bacteria was 35.8% higher than that by GB nutrient agar and 9.5% higher than that by FDA standard method agar respectively.