Scale calibration or the lack of, can have detrimental effects on your food business. Not only can it leave your food business open to regulatory action it can also encourage your customers not to buy your food product again.
Why is scale calibration important?
The main reason to ensure that your scales have been calibrated is to ensure that the scales are reading correctly. This can have an impact on the risk exposure for your food business in a number of ways including:
Finished product weight different to labelled weight – Finished product that goes out to you customer (especially in the retail environment) that is less than your stated label weight, can leave your business exposed to regulatory enforcement.
Maintaining consistency with your recipe – Some food businesses may use several different scales within the raw material weigh-up. This can impact the overall finished product specification if scales are not calibrated. For example, if your scales were out by say 10%, this would mean that the raw material going into the recipe is out 10%. The impacts on the final food include both food safety and food quality attributes. Eg the final food maybe too salty if salt % was incorrect.
Product profitability – If your food business is on the ball, I am sure that the ‘bean counters’ know exactly how much it costs to make a finished product. This would include the cost of each of your raw materials that go into make that finished product. If the sale price has been calculated based on x% of raw material A, any change to that (through scales not weighing correctly) can have an effect on the finished product production cost.
Who completes your scale calibration?
You may currently complete both internal calibration of your scales and external calibration. Internal scale calibration may involve checking all of your scales at the start of production and at different times throughout production. This is usually performed using a set of calibrated test weights by a person who has been adequately trained.
External scale calibration is where an external authorised authority checks and calibrates your scales. This calibration company would usually provide some type of scale calibration certification record.
Checking your scale calibrations
Take time this week to go and check that all of your scales have been calibrated. You can follow the instructions listed below.
Step 1: Grab a copy of your documented calibration schedule. If you don’t have one, you can click here to download a template that will help you document one for your business.
Step 2: Match up the last calibration record for all of the scales that you have on your calibration schedule. This maybe include both internal and external scale calibration.
Step 3: Any scales that were found to be out of the scale calibration period, organise to have these calibrated.
Optional task
You can also take this opportunity to check that the location, frequency of calibration and scale serial numbers are correct to what is documented within your calibration schedule.
