ENGINEERING FOR FOOD SAFETY AND QUALITY

Consumers expect the U.S. food industry to develop and deliver safe, high-quality, nutritious, and healthy food products while also addressing several emerging sustainability issues such as resource consumption, food loss and waste, food waste management, and food safety. With these demands have emerged a need for food engineers to develop and deliver novel solutions to address these competing challenges. Food engineering and processing research is critical for the U.S. food industry to develop and process nutritious and safe food products. The food industry must constantly redefine technology to assure wholesomeness in processed foods. New and existing technologies must meet the challenge and play a pivotal role in improving the quality of value-added food products. To effectively compete in the global markets, the U.S. food industry requires ready access to the scientific knowledge, well prepared personnel with appropriate skills, and a continuous dialog between academic researchers and industry practitioners.However, many key technical hurdles need to be overcome to meet these goals. To solve these technical hurdles, there is a critical need for interdisciplinary efforts and collaboration among food engineers, food scientists, and food industry professionals across the nation. Novel thermal processing technologies will be investigated for various food processing applications. These technologies include high pressure processing, pulsed ultraviolet light, ozone, and electrolyzed oxidizing water. Processing parameters will be optimized for specific applications to make the process more economical and less nutritionally destructive to the processed foods. Furthermore, cleaning and sanitation of food processing equipment will also be investigated by these novel approaches. Teaching modules on novel food processing technologies will also be developed.The overall outcome of the project is to develop technologies to provide safe foods with highest quality for the consumers.