Safety Gloves for Food Processing and Catering
Australian food processing runs from red meat and poultry works to seafood, dairy and horticulture packing. Gloves in this sector face two masters at once. They must control a serious cut hazard and simultaneously satisfy food safety requirements that most industrial gloves cannot meet.
Cut from blades
Boning and slicing carry the highest cut risk of any routine industrial task, because a sharp knife is deliberately driven towards the supporting hand during trimming and the blade slips on bone and fat. The property required is a high cut level on the non knife hand, typically a stainless steel mesh glove or a TDM level E or F liner, with a lighter glove acceptable on the knife hand.
Chemical cleaning agents
Sanitation crews work with caustics, peracetic acid, chlorinated foams and quaternary compounds at concentrations that cause burns and dermatitis. Cut gloves offer no barrier to these. The property required is a certified chemical gauntlet under EN ISO 374-1 with letter codes matching the sanitiser in use.
Hygiene compliance
Anything touching product must be declared suitable for food contact and must be visually detectable if it fails. That is why food area gloves are supplied in blue, a colour absent from food, and why powder free construction is mandatory. Gloves must also be smooth enough to clean or cheap enough to discard at every break.
What to specify
Specify EN 388:2016+A1:2018 for cut protection, food contact suitability under EN 1186 migration testing for anything touching product, and EN ISO 374-1 for the sanitation crew. Single use gloves in food areas should be powder free and blue.
The usual arrangement is a high cut glove or steel mesh on the supporting hand for boning and trimming, single use nitrile over the top where product contact occurs, and a separate chemical gauntlet issued to sanitation. Cold rooms and chillers add an EN 511 requirement on top.
Recommended gloves
- GRANBERG 502: Food-safe cut-resistant Typhoon® liner gloves with ANSI A5 / EN Cut E protection.
- GRANBERG 504: Cut-resistant inner gloves for food & cold environments. Typhoon® fibre, ANSI Cut Level A5.
- GRANBERG 0400A: Chemical-resistant latex gloves with flock lining. Food-safe, Type A certified, virus-tested.
- GRANBERG 0300: Soft chemical-resistant PVC gloves for cleaning and catering. Rayon flock lined, phthalates-free.
Frequently asked questions
What cut level do boning room gloves need?
The supporting hand needs the highest practical protection, which is normally a stainless steel mesh glove or a TDM level E or F liner. Blade contact during trimming is direct and under force, and lower levels will not hold. The knife hand can usually run a lighter grip focused glove.
Are cut resistant gloves food contact approved?
Not automatically. Food contact suitability is a separate declaration based on migration testing under EN 1186 for the food types involved. Many facilities solve this by wearing a single use nitrile glove over the cut resistant glove, which also makes the cut glove easier to keep clean.
Why are food industry gloves blue?
Blue does not occur naturally in most foods, so a fragment of a torn glove is visible during inspection and on optical sorting lines. Combined with powder free construction and a change at every break, the colour is part of the foreign body control system rather than a style choice.