This term was renamed from "food product by quality" to align better with COB "characteristic" label, and as well to disambiguate from other use of "quality" as a food grading. This term is useful for tasks like food inspection where little prior knowledge of how the food came to be is available. Some terms like "food (frozen)" are both a quality descriptor and the output of a process.

Food material which has been categorized by a characteristic such as granularity or temperature.