Summary of the Week and looking ahead

During the first week, you learned what the term ‘food processing’ means and why we need to process food.

Food processing at the industrial scale, aims to deliver high quality, safe products in a sustainable way, that meet the demands of consumers. There are many reasons why food is processed and they include:

• Making foods edible

• Increasing the shelf life of food and preventing microbial contamination for the duration

• Maintaining the (nutritional) quality and stability of food as well as ensuring the retention of health-related components

• Increasing the availability of food throughout the year

• Increasing the range of products that are convenient and suit our on-the-go lifestyle

• Ensuring food is affordable.

Building on this foundation, Week 2 of the course will introduce you to traditional, widely used processing technologies such as homogenisation, pasteurisation, canning and drying. You’ll discuss their advantages and disadvantages and the products they are used in. We look forward to seeing you next week.