Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) meat is a culturally and nutritionally significant product of Fennoscandian pastoralism. While the meat is available widely in the market in the producing countries, yet it lacks a species-specific quality classification system. The EUROP carcass grading framework, designed for cattle, is used instead, despite not fully suitable for cervids. Technologies, such as image based automated grading, also remain untested on reindeer. This review examines the current state of reindeer meat quality classification and evaluates the potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to address the identified technological gaps. A comprehensive literature search was conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, supplemented by EU regulatory documents and published ethnographic sources on traditional Sámi knowledge systems. The review reveals that applying the EUROP system on reindeer meat requires oversimplification: fat scoring collapses into a single class owing to negligible subcutaneous fat, and conformation scoring reflects bovine muscularity benchmarks irrelevant to cervid anatomy. While this simplification works, some specific, important characters of reindeer meat might not be captured. Neither official veterinary inspection nor traditional Sámi assessment incorporates instrumental quality measurement, leaving ultimate pH, colour, and dark, firm, dry (DFD) status unmeasured. HSI has demonstrated strong predictive performance for these parameters in beef, pork, lamb, and farmed red deer venison, yet a systematic database search confirmed the complete absence of any HSI study on reindeer carcass and meat for grading purposes as of January 2026. This gap is significant because the quality parameters most critical to the reindeer industry are precisely those for which HSI has shown its strongest capability. A phased research roadmap is proposed, encompassing construction of a reindeer-specific spectral reference library, pilot deployment of portable snapshot HSI systems in remote slaughterhouses, and integration of instrumental quality indicators with traditional Sámi knowledge through participatory co-design. This methodological template is transferable to other underserved niche meat species worldwide.