“Food-grade” is one of the most-used and least-defined phrases in warehousing. Plenty of facilities say it. Fewer can tell you which license it refers to, who inspects them, and when they were last inspected. If you import packaged food or beverages through Laredo, those are the questions to ask — and here are our answers.
What “food-grade” has to mean in Texas
In Texas, a warehouse that holds food for sale or distribution — its own or someone else’s — has to be licensed by the Texas Department of State Health Services as a food wholesaler or warehouse operator, and is subject to state inspection. That’s not a marketing term. It’s a license number, a fee, and an inspector who can show up.
Gilbert International holds a DSHS Food Wholesaler license. That is the first thing to ask any Laredo warehouse that says “food-grade,” and the first thing we’ll show you.
What the inspector actually looks at
The state and the city are looking for the same fundamentals, and they’re the same things your own customers’ auditors will ask about.
Pest control. A documented program with a licensed operator, bait-station maps, and service logs. In South Texas this is the one that fails facilities most often. It has to be continuous, not a reaction to a finding.
Segregation. Food product stored away from chemicals, off the floor, away from walls, with no shared racking with anything that can contaminate it. In a 250,000-square-foot mixed facility this means designated food space with its own rules — not the same floor as steel coil.
Sanitation. Cleaning schedules, drainage, no standing water, dock doors that seal, and a building that is kept that way between inspections rather than for them. The City of Laredo Public Health Department inspects and grades us on this separately from the state.
Records. Lot-level receiving, storage location, and withdrawal — so a recall or a customer audit can trace a lot in minutes, not days. This is the part most facilities can’t produce on demand. Ours is the same recordkeeping we run for bonded freight, where CBP requires it, applied to everything.
Three certifications, three different jobs
We get asked what “certified” means, so here is exactly what we hold and what each one does.
Texas DSHS Food Wholesaler license. The state authorization to hold and distribute food. Subject to state inspection.
City of Laredo Public Health Department sanitation grade. The local inspection of the physical building — cleanliness, pest control, structure. Municipal, separate from the state, and posted.
Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Bonded Warehouse Permit. Alcohol is its own regulatory world. Under the Alcoholic Beverage Code, a public warehouse can only hold beer, wine or spirits for TABC permittees if it is itself permitted. We are. Combined with our customs bonded classes, that means imported spirits or Mexican beer can cross at Laredo, sit with the federal duty clock stopped, and be held legally under state law — in one building.
What we don’t claim
We don’t hold a GFSI scheme certification such as SQF or BRC, and we don’t say we do. If your customer contract requires one, tell us up front. Our food-grade space is licensed, inspected and graded for packaged and shelf-stable product, beverages and alcohol. We have temperature-controlled space for product that can’t sit in a South Texas summer; we do not have refrigerated or frozen storage. If your program needs something beyond that, we’d rather say so in the first call than in an audit.
Why it matters at the border specifically
A lot of food and beverage crossing at Laredo isn’t ready to go to a retailer’s DC. It needs to be received, consolidated, relabeled for the U.S. market, or held until an order lands. A licensed food-grade warehouse at the crossing — three hours from Monterrey, same-day to San Antonio and Dallas–Fort Worth — lets that happen without the product going to a metro facility first and coming back. A licensed food-grade warehouse that is also customs bonded and TABC-permitted lets it happen with duty deferred.
Ask us the three questions
Which license, who inspects, when last. We’ll answer all three on the first call, along with the commodity, volume and whether any of it needs to stay in bond. Request a quote or see the warehousing page.