Did you know our coloured stainless steel is food-safe?

It has just been confirmed again.

On 29 June 2026, ISEGA Cert GmbH in Aschaffenburg reassessed our stainless steel sheets coloured by the INOX-SPECTRAL® process. The result reached us fresh off the press, under registration number 67471 U 26:

• The coloured sheets may be used in catering and food service facilities for warm and cold food service, and may be in **direct contact with foodstuffs** while doing so.

The assessment examined whether, and what, the surface releases into the food. The basis for evaluation: Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004, sections 30 and 31 of the German Food and Feed Code (LFGB), Council of Europe Resolution CM/Res(2020)9, and the technical guide *"Metals and alloys used in food contact materials and articles"* in its second edition of 2024.

Black at the servery. Bronze on the counter. Steel blue in the show kitchen. All permitted, all in the direct contact area.

And now for the genuinely interesting part: why does this work at all?

Colour without colour

The answer is almost disappointingly simple: because there is no colour on this sheet.

No lacquer. No pigment. No dye. No coating. Nothing that was applied, and therefore nothing that can come off again.

This is precisely where coated surfaces usually fail in food environments. A lacquer is a layer on the metal. Under cleaning cycles, chemicals and mechanical wear it will eventually flake, and a flake of lacquer ends up in the food. Which is why coated surfaces are simply not provided for there.

Our colour is not a layer on the metal. It is the metal.

 

How we do it

Picture a soap bubble. Its skin is colourless, and yet it shimmers in turquoise, violet and gold. The reason is interference: light is reflected at both the top and the bottom of an extremely thin layer, the two waves overlap, certain wavelengths reinforce each other while others cancel out. What remains is colour.

Every stainless steel carries a thin, entirely transparent chromium oxide layer, the passive layer that makes it stainless. In the computer-controlled electrochemical inoxSPECTRAL process, we strengthen exactly this layer, to a precisely defined thickness.

And depending on that thickness, the surface turns champagne. Gold. Bronze. Steel blue. Cobalt blue. Black.

So we do not apply colour. We build a layer at which colour comes into being.

Everything else follows from that:

• Nothing can flake off, because nothing sits on top.
• Nothing can migrate, there is no binder, no solvent, no pigment.
• Corrosion resistance is fully retained: the passive layer is not removed but reinforced, and thereby even slightly improved.
• Cleaning agents and chemicals cannot attack the colour, because they cannot attack what is part of the surface itself.
• The shade changes with the light. Because the colour is an optical effect, it shifts with the viewing angle. No paint can do that.

 

What this means for your project

The old trade-off, design or hygiene - pick one, disappears. Colour in the contact area is no longer a question of nerve, but a question of shade.

Then there is format. We colour components up to 6,000 × 1,200 × 2,000 mm: large surfaces with few joints, and joints are what create the work in hygiene planning. Alongside sheets, we also colour expanded metal, wire mesh, profiles and small parts.

Two points belong in an honest account. The declaration covers coloured stainless steel sheets in the application of warm and cold food service, for other uses in food or process environments, we are happy to review your specific case with you. And in the area of weld seams the colouring is dissolved, depending on the welding process; joining before colouring is therefore usually the right sequence.

 

Request the declaration

For over 40 years we have been refining stainless steel surfaces in Walldürn, Germany, pre-treatment, grinding, blasting, polishing, colouring and post-treatment from a single source, ISO 9001 certified, made in Germany.

The full certificate of compliance is available in our download area. Planning a project in catering or commercial kitchen equipment? Send us the material, format, desired surface finish and shade — we will agree the result on a sample.

 

INOX-COLOR · transforming surfaces.