Buyers often use “grading” and “Sortex” as if they were the same quality step. They are two different machines doing two different jobs, and knowing which one you are asking for changes both the specification and the price.
Grading separates by size
After whitening and polishing, milled rice goes over grading sieves. These separate the stream mechanically by grain dimension: full grains one way, broken fractions another. That is where khud, grader fraction and rice cuts come from — they are not a lesser product, they are a size class, and they are sold as their own line to food processing, brewing and starch industries and to animal-feed compounders.
What grading controls is the broken percentage in your lot. When you specify “up to 5%” or “up to 15%” brokens, you are specifying how the grader is set and how much of the stream is diverted.
Sorting separates by colour
The Sortex is an optical colour sorter. Rice falls past cameras, and grains outside the accepted colour band are ejected by air jets — discoloured, chalky, immature or stained grains, and any remaining foreign matter that survived pre-cleaning. It does nothing about size.
What sorting controls is appearance uniformity. A Sortex-finished lot looks consistent in the bag; a non-sorted lot of the same variety and the same broken percentage will show more colour variation.
Why both terms appear on the same product
A product described as Sortex Miniket has been through grading and colour sorting. Miniket Non-Silky has been graded and milled to a lower degree of polish without the same colour-sorting finish. Same variety, same mill, different route through the last two machines — and the rejection fraction the sorter removes becomes its own product line.
A third variable: polish
Polish is separate again. “Silky” means a higher degree of whitening for a brighter grain; “non-silky” keeps a lower polish, which several regional and institutional markets specifically prefer. Polish affects appearance and cooking, not size or colour uniformity.
What to put in an enquiry
Name the variety, then say three things separately: the maximum broken percentage you accept (grading), whether the rice should be colour sorted (Sortex), and the degree of polish (silky or non-silky). Those three settings are what the mill actually adjusts. Send them together and you will get a quotation against your specification rather than a general offer.
