Food safety plays a very crucial role in health-related issues, while food wastage, in turn, affects the economy of the country. In this work, an expert system is proposed for investigating the process of paddy dispatched from food godown for public distribution. It consists of three input variables temperature, humidity, and alcoholic vapour and one output variable for determining the paddy quality. Based on the input variables, fuzzy interference system was designed using Mamdani rule base and centroid-based defuzzification system. The expert system will provide a recommendation for dispatching the paddy which is highly prone to degrade. The proposed system performance was validated using empirical results, and better performance was achieved. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.