Conceptual foundations of food process engineering

Chemical engineering was born at the beginning of the 20th century in response to the rapid development of certain industries, particularly the oil industry. Integrating the scientific advances of the time, it developed concepts and tools (described in this article) that made it a new scientific field.

The food industry joined this movement in the 1960s, at a time when many of its sectors were industrializing. Food Process Engineering (FPE) provides the tools for understanding, calculating and extrapolating the results of this industrialization process.

This article shows the place of GPA in the current evolution of the food industry:

• These industries tend to be organized into ingredient and additive industries, on the one hand, and formulation and shaping industries, on the other;

• to meet society's growing demands in terms of quality, safety, respect for the environment and profitability, which means that all production factors must be increasingly controlled;

• increasing use, both in research and in day-to-day plant operation, of concepts and tools from mathematics, biology, physical chemistry, mechanics, automation, economics and more. All of this enables us to take ever greater account of the complexity of phenomena.