4. Conclusions

The following points should be borne in mind.

• Food process engineering, including bioreactions, emerged from chemical engineering in the 60s, and has now become an active branch of process engineering. It is playing its part in the rapid evolution of today's food industries.

• Today, this discipline is progressing by opening up to scientific advances in a wide range of disciplines. Research is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary, and new techniques are often the result of technology transfer.

• The food industry, which initially focused on preserving products and separating their constituents, without neglecting these aspects, is increasingly becoming an "industry for developing new materials", as well as for "generating manufactured...