The importance of weighing ingredients has been recognised a long time ago as too much or too little of an ingredient can potentially affect the final result of any dish or product. If you are serving up 100 plates of fish, every plate should look the same therefore a weighing scale is indispensable. More so when it comes to baking; no baker would tell you to just guess the amount of flour or sugar to put in. It is also necessary for processing factories when they package the products.
However, there are different weighing scales depending on application and environment that it will be used in. A unit must be able to produce accuracy under any possible atmosphere such as when weighing a product in lower temperatures as many scales tend to react to variation of temperature hence increasing the chance of error. At the same time, it should be resistant to corrosion due to moisture when used near warm equipment or the environment as well as condensation from usage in a cold place. Even its LCD display need to remain visible and retain contrast in low temperatures instead of fogging up or lose its function.
PRECISION SCALES
Usually used when a recipe requires a list of ingredients that have to be measured out correctly to obtain the same resulting taste such as the making of bottled marinade, pastry or bread mix. These types of scales can be customised especially for automated food processing applications where ingredients are weighed, mixed and processed. Post process, the mix could be packaged differently; frozen, vacuum packed or dry and each would also require a different calibration. Some higher end scales in this category are able to automatically deduct weight for the container that the ingredient is in so that you do not have to manually compute.
DIGITAL BENCH SCALES
Most commonly used in grocery stores or supermarkets to weigh loose items or lightweight items on top of scale’s flat surface. The digital bench can also be used with the hanging scale to handle larger loads such as poultry and seafood. It is easy because users can input
the price information into the scale and when any food item is weighed, all users need to do is key in the respective code to result in an accurate weight and price to the last cent.
PLATFORM SCALES
Commonly seen in industrial food processing and packaging applications to handle large loads of items kept in barrels, drums and tubs. Placed on the floor, it is able to weigh between 5,000-10,000 pounds of food items which proves useful in distributing pallets of food or packing for shipping. In most settings that involve food, the digital version of weighing scale is almost always used because of the precision it can provide, reducing the possibility of errors that can affect the final product.
