Food Safety

Fresh, Dried or Canned: One Produce Chain, Three Sets of Rules

By AGS Compliance Team April 14, 2026 2 min read
Fresh, Dried or Canned: One Produce Chain, Three Sets of Rules

A tomato can reach the market fresh, sun-dried or in a can — and each route is governed by a completely different discipline. Graders argue tolerances at the pack-house, drying yards fight insects rather than bacteria, and canneries live or die by retort schedules they are not even allowed to set themselves. Businesses that handle more than one of these routes usually hold one set of rules and improvise the rest — until an inspector asks for the missing two.

Three Products, Three Defining Hazards

Fresh produce is a grading and homogeneity problem: the package is the unit of truth, and the Extra/Grade 1/Grade 2 cascade runs on defined tolerances. Dried fruit is an infestation problem — the drying yard is legally a food-processing area, and the principal enemy is the insect. Canned produce is a thermal-process problem, where schedules are set by a qualified process authority and the can itself signals failure before it is opened.

The Standards Behind the Pack

The three guidelines are international normalizations of GSO 123:1990 with GSO 125:1990 sampling integrated, GSO 1382:2002 on dried fruits, and UAE.S/GSO 1906:2009 on canned fruit and vegetable products — aligned with the Codex codes CXC 53, CXC 3 and CXC 23 respectively. Grading, rejection grounds, irrigation water, pest control and hygiene programmes are all preserved from source and explained in operating terms.

What's in the Pack

Three coordinated, fully editable guidelines:

  • Fresh Fruits and Vegetables (International Edition) — grading, tolerances and sampling
  • Dried Fruits Hygiene (International Edition) — drying yards, pests and sanitary harvesting
  • Canned Fruit and Vegetable Products (International Edition) — hygiene and process control
  • Shared definitions, document control and defined verbal forms across all three

Ready to close the gap? Every AGS pack is delivered as an instant digital download of fully editable Microsoft Word (.docx) files, complete with document control pages, contents tables and defined verbal forms. There is no waiting, no licensing negotiation and no locked PDF: rebrand the files, adapt them to your jurisdiction and your house style, and put them in front of your team the same day. Visit the AGS store and download the pack now — and turn a shelf of scattered standards into one working system.

Product: 04 Fresh Produce — available as an instant-download, fully editable package from AGS (SKU AGS-04-004).

The toolkit for this guide: International Technical Guidelines Pack - Fresh Produce & Processed Fruit and Vegetables. Instant download, fully editable, yours to keep.

AGS Compliance Team

Our toolkits and guides are written by practising auditors who assess management systems against ISO, BRCGS, HACCP and Halal schemes. Every document reflects what assessors actually look for.