Food Grading & Sampling Service

At Edwards Transport, our food grading and sampling facility provides customers with a spacious, hygienic environment for food testing to ensure it meets food safety regulations.

What is Food Grading?

Food grading is the process of assessing and inspecting various foods to determine their quality, safety, and market value. This grading system applies to both food and non-food items to ensure they:

Are safe to consume.
Can contact food while remaining safe

Importance of Food Grading

Food grading is crucial for maintaining food safety, quality control, and consumer trust. It ensures that food products meet legal and market standards, providing consumers with high-quality, safe food. Proper grading can also enhance the market value of food products by certifying their quality and compliance with regulatory standards.

Grading Systems and Standards

Different types of food can be graded to various standards, reflecting food quality standards and criteria specific to each type. For example, dairy products undergo rigorous tests to ensure they meet food safety and hygiene standards. The grading process for dairy products includes:

Receiving a sterile sample of the product
Following the latest “Standard Methods for the Examination of Dairy Products”
Conducting various tests to ensure compliance

All of the tests carried out ensure that food safety and food hygiene standards are met. Although constructed with the cheese and dairy industries in mind our food grading facility is adaptable and can be used for a number of food based services. Furthermore, within the same facility we are able to offer cheese cleaning and repacking facilities to our clients.

Food Safety and Quality Assurance

Ensuring food safety is a top priority in the food grading process. Quality assurance measures are implemented to maintain high standards throughout the production and distribution of food products. This includes regular inspections, adherence to hygiene protocols, and compliance with legal regulations.

Food Certification

Food certification is a vital part of the grading process, providing an official verification that food products meet established standards. Certifications can cover various aspects, including organic status, non-GMO, fair trade, and specific quality grades. Certified products often command higher market prices and consumer trust.

Beef Food Grading

Grading Beef involves observing the criteria of The Beef Carcase Classification scheme: classify carcases.
This comprises of:

Dressing the carcase
Categorising the carcase
Classifying the carcase – According to conformation (flesh coverage and overall shape), fat coverage and weight.
Stamping or labelling the carcase
Communicate the classification results

Grading by hand

Food grading such as the inspection of fruits after washing can be done by hand. The effectiveness of hand grading depends on a number of things:

The quality of the product
The quantity of product per inspector
The Inspectors experience and physical condition
The kind of inspection that is taking place– larger quantities of product such as grain, is graded on smaller random samples.
The speed that the products pass the inspector – This is specific to the type of product

Grading by machinery

Food grading by machinery can generally be more efficient, especially for companies, which have a larger quantity of products.
The quality and freshness of a product can be graded by colour measurement, use of x rays, lasers and infrared rays as well as microwaves.
Machinery can also be used when sorting food. Sorting machinery can sort food based on their: