Food Engineering

Summary

Food engineering is a rapidly changing discipline. Traditionally, the main focus was on food preservation and stabilization, whereas trends now are on diversity, health, taste, and sustainable production. Next to a general introduction of the definition of food engineering, this article gives a historic overview of the discipline in time, discusses the main fields within the discipline such as thermal and nonthermal stabilization processes, separation and isolation processes, chemical and biochemical conversions, mixing and structuring processes. Education in food engineering is given separate attention. Finally, developments and challenges in preparing for the future are discussed.