Quality Inspection Guidelines for Norwegian wild bluefin tuna

Summary

This document serves as a comprehensive industry guideline for quality inspection of Norwegian bluefin tuna on land, with the aim of providing a shared understanding and standardized framework for evaluating and communicating quality. Different parts of bluefin tuna are used to evaluate different quality attributes including appearance, colour, fat content, freshness and the presence of yake (burnt tuna syndrome). To each attribute, a grading scale of 1-5 is employed to allow numerical evaluation in this guideline. The most critical items are colour, fat content and the occurrence of yake, with the remaining attributes serving as supplementary evaluations. The fish should be placed on a well-lit platform to allow visual inspection of whole body. In some circumstances inspection may be done at landing or during packing. It is standard practice to assess all items at once (or within a short timeframe) ensuring that both freshness and quality attributes are considered during the inspection. Visual insp