Importance of Food Engineering for Innovating Food Quality

Abstract

Food engineering plays a significant role in food production to achieve a high quality. Increasingly discriminating consumer taste has resulted in pressures to improve the quality of food products at ever higher stages: from simple combinations of basic taste components; to the flavor stage, at which basic taste sensations and flavors are combined; to the stage of combined which incorporates food textures; to the still higher stage of integrated taste, in which cultural and psychological factors play a role. These trends have created demand for food products that offer superior characteristics at the highest stages of food quality. Food production at such levels will require approaches based on new food engineering. As pointed out by Dr. Toshimasa Yano, Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo, food production faces numerous challenges: 1) the unpredictability of physical properties of raw materials; 2) an over-dependence on sensory tests and insufficiency of subjectivity in quality evaluations; 3) the simultaneous occurrence of numerous changes during food processing. This paper will seek to address the role of food engineering in improving quality in food production processes. The examples used to illustrate these issues will include the following: 1) a quantitative evaluation of the kneaded state of bread dough; 2) quantitative identification of factors influencing the intensity of retort sterilization; and 3) quantitative determination of component dissipation during spray-drying.