The growth in the popularity and consumption of pizzas has led to the need for automated quality inspection, so as to maintain confidence and increase production efficiency. In the current research the use of computer vision for inspection of pizza base and tomato sauce spread quality was investigated. Twenty pizza bases were analysed for base area, spatial ratio I (SRI), spatial ratio 11 (SRII), and circularity. For the measurement of the sauce spread characteristics based on 25 samples, the indexes taken were sauce area and heavy area percentage; a fuzzy logic system was then developed to classify the sauce spread samples into classes of acceptable and defective quality. The base area analysis gave a classification error of 13% when compared to human assessment. The experimental results for the sauce spread analysis show that by using computer vision in conjunction with fuzzy logic a classification accuracy of 92% can be achieved. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.