Handbook

Food processing is the transformation of raw ingredients into food products that are safe to eat, provide nutrition, dietary variety and convenience with extended shelf life. This course will give you a foundational understanding of the processes we use to transform food (also known as ‘unit operations’). Even though their sequences may change from product to product and plant to plant, they are all governed by the same basic principles. Principles such as the conservation of momentum, mass and energy, heat and mass transfer, and thermodynamics, that you have mastered in earlier courses.

This course introduces some of the more important unit operations in the food industry such as refrigeration, evaporation, dehydration, packaging, extrusion, and physical separations. You will learn to describe the processes, their applications and effects on food products using appropriate process diagrams, and to analyse them using mass and heat balances.

Finally, having completed this course, you will be able to rapidly understand other unit operations not taught in this course, since they are all based on the same fundamental principles. The skills you develop will enable you to understand, manage, optimize, and improve actual industrial food manufacturing processes.