Technological innovation is presented as one of the answers to the constraints in the food

industry. Examples of innovations or research, manly in the fields of preservation (thermal and
nonthermal techniques), manufacturing operations (operations on individual pieces), automatic
control, etc., are presented. New tools and concepts used in product and process development are
described, such as product, material, and reaction engineering. Emphasis is placed on
beterogeneous and composite products. Finally, the authors present their ideas about
challengesto the foodindustry in coming years. The food industry is at the same time the instigator
and the subject of cbange insociety. When the food industry is subjected to several kinds of
constraints, it has to modify its structures, and these evolutions have an impact on its technology.

CONSTRAINTS, CONTEXT, AND REASONS FOR INNOVATlON

How INNOVATlVE 15 THE fOOD INDUSTRV?

Table 2.1 presents our views of constraints to which the food industry is being subjected: Due to
the context described here, the food industry has to manage innovatio to modify and adapt its
technologies. The objectives of this adaptation have varied with time, as shown in Figure 2.1.
PresentIy, the accent is placed on safety and on an increase in quality homogeneity. But, when we
consider the introduction of new technologies in the food industries during the past few decades,
the number of real innovations turns out to be rather low:

There have been few new unit operations, except extrusion cooking, membrane separations,
irradiation, high-pressure treatrnents, and, in a sense, manufacturing operations. Sorne new
processes have been required to make new products (i.e., prepared salads, new composite
desserts, osmo-dehydrated products, etc.) and new operations (membranes, extrusion cooking). G
Many new techniques are used in unit operations: aseptic techniques, super critical extraction and
osmotic dehydration (both being new forms of solvent extraction), ohmic heating, RF heating,
water-jet cutting, associative packaging, image analysis, etc.

This shows that most of fue existing teclmologies have been in use for a long time; there is more
progressive evolution than striking innovation.

WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR INNOVATION?

A set, probably not exhaustive, of reasons for innovation eonsists of the following:

Allhough heat is fue most common method for transformation, sanitaton, and preservation, it is
well known today that the eonsequences of heating are not neeessarily good for the producto
Therefore, nonthermal processing is an important objective. On the other hand, the ability to
perform aecurate separations of biomolecules becomes more and more important. The
consequences of such progress are the lengthening of preservation time and an increase in the
consumer's perception of the food as being "natural." Another driving force for innovation is
probably fue attainment of new properties (texture or aroma, for exarnple), which may require
new technologies. The design of new products is a matter of competitiveness for industry. In such
new products, safety considerations become very important (Figure 2.1). The competition
.between companies and the relative ease in fue design of "me-too" products imply firms'
increasing focus on technologies involved in the process. Innovation is evidently the direct result
o research and development within the firmo But it is also the consequence of research made
elsewhere. Transfer from one industrial domain to another is a frequent path of innovation. Screw
extrusion was used in the plastics industry before being transferred to the food industry to be
utilized in extrusion cooking. Today, one of fue most promising directions of research and
inuovation is certainly derived from rapid progress made in the field of biology,

Another important point is the acceptance of the new technology by the user. It is obvious that
this mechanism of acceptance is not easy to implement, Figure 2.2 represents different points that
have to be considered during the evaluation of a new technology for industrial purposes.

TECHNOlOGICAl TRENDS

EMERGING PROCESSING AND PRESERVATION METHODS

An exhaustive presentation of emerging methods for the processing of food products is quite
difficult. In the case of preservation, sorne points are summarized in Table 2.2. In sorne cases,
technologies have already been transferred to industry,The main idea for such research is to
process food without heat. In fact, in many of these technologies, some heating occurs during
processing. Except in sorne specific applications that are highlighted in Table 2.2, it becomes
obvious that a combination of technologies is preferred.

Also, in the heat processing of food, major improvements can be provided using a combination of
classical heating methods (convection in-air or Iiquid) and new technologies as presented in brief
in Table 2.3. The way to combine these technol- . ogies is not well established at present.
Nevertheless, numerous applications ate available, An interesting point to discuss is the aseptic
processing principle. It must be indicated here that it is not realIy a new unit operation or principIe
of processing, but it is a new set of technologies that permit work to take place in a safe and
hygienic climate. The next questiort for such processes that researchers and engineers have to
face concems process optimization. But the introduction of the hygiene point of view probably will
be very important to the future of food industries (see Figure 2.1

2.2.2 BIOTECHNOLOGY

The use of biotechnology and of biologic steps during processing has increasing importance. A
comprehensive discussion would be necessary to describe this aspect. Sorne of this inforrnation is
reported in Reference 2. Table 2.4 summarizes a few directions of progress in bioteehnology that,
in our opinion, offer important contr- butions to the evolution of food industries. When more
generally speaking ofbiology, nutrition must also be quoted as becoming a major incentive for the
creation of new products. Other technological evolutions have been described aboye. We now
present as separate topics two specfic trends: food manufacturing operations and automatic
control

2.3 FOOD MANUFACTURING OPERATlONS

A visit to almost any food plant will show two types of operations:

1. Treatment ofproduct in bulk, mainly liquids orsolid particles, corresponding to the classical
unit operations of chemical and food engineering (centrifugation, heatinglcooling in
exchangers, distillation, milling, etc.)
 2. Treatments on "objects," i.e., products like pizzas, cakes, pieces of meat or fish, and
packaged products (cans, bottles, etc.); examples of such operations include the
deposition of fruits on a pie, cutting, molding, assembling of severa1parts, packaging, etc.

Infact,most products soldto consumers (excludingmost ingredients sentto secondary

transformation) in industrial countries for many years have no longer been cornmercialized in
bulk, Products are packaged, and often shaped, either traditionally (e.g., bread, sausages,
cheeses, and biscuits) or in new shapes (e.g., fish fingers and frozen hamburgers).
Furthermore, people consume more and more composite objects such as two-layer dessert
creams, multilayer cakes, ice crearos in eones, pizzas, industrial sandwiches, and prepared
dishes. All of this meansthat growing parts of food plants are devotedto fomng, assembling,
conveying,and otherwiseprocessing such objects.

WHAT ARE FOOD MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS?

We have proposed" to define a new category of unit operations of food engineering that we could
callfood manufacturing operations. It could be defined as operations

considering objects individually or starting from a bulk product to inake such individual objects.
These objects are generally "large," but their size .is AQ~me relevant eriterion. Iffruits are peeled
by a knife, they receive an individual treatmet, and the position of each of them is determined;
this.maybe considered a manufacturing operation. When potatoes are peeled by abrasion, the
position of each of them is not controlled; there is random treatment 00 a bulk product, Similarly,
the color sorting of coffee granules by high-velocity optical machines considers each grain
individually, and this operation can be considered food manufacturing.

CAN WE DEFINE FOOD MANUFACTURING UNIT'" OPERATlONS?

We can tentatively make a list of such unit operations (Table 2.5) as follows:

.. Many heat and mass transfer operations (can sterilization and drying) are based 00 principIes
that do not differ from the principIes of opera:tions performed on bulk products, and they are
classically studied,

Tbe same situation exists for reaetions in food objects; their rates are determined by heat
andJormass transfer and/or by reactions kinetics-e-all classical concepts, .

Transportation of objects is not specific to the food industry if these objects are packages or
packaged products; however, a specficity exists if it concems bare food objects, beeause problems
of stickiness, hygiene, and deformation may be encountered if the producs are semisolids.

This means that the most interesting and original of these unit operations consists of shaping,
separation, and assembly, including packaging.

CHARACTERISTICFEATURESOF FOOD MAI'\IUFACTURtNG OPERATlONS

These manufacturing operations have other fearures that justify special interest, Many of them
treat products on open conveyors or in open vesse1sor equipment, and they include human
handling or the close proximity of humans. This means that hygienic questions are often critica1
for such operations and justify the use of microbiological control of the atmosphere. Clean rooms
or aerobic protection of equipment must be employed. In many instances, heterogeneity is part of
product quality, especially when a composite object consists, for example, of the combination of
soft and crispy layers. The problem is then to control the transfer of wateriand/orother molecules)
between these layers. In matters of quality, each piece must fulfill certain requirements (weight,
composition, contamination, etc.), whereas bulk products are sold by total weight and average
characteristics with certain variation allowable among samples. Many of these operations are
results of the industrialization of manual operations developed in kitchens. Mechanization may be
difficult due to the complex nature of many products (thick liquids, pastes, or semisolids=-fragle,
deformable, often sticky) ro fue composite structure of many of them and to their complicated
shapes or dispositions. For example, think of how we could mechanize the deposition of four
anchovies on a pizza, In such operations, the mechanical design of the machine must be related to
a knowledge of the mechanical behavior of the product. Even then, repetitive mechanization,
which requires constant human supervision, is real automation and is difficult to realize, because it
supposes SOrne real-time measurements, The weight of pieces is fairly easy to measure (as is
.color), but the determination of shape may require image analysis techniques. Furthermore,
automating the control of plants that inelude such operations is very different from the case
ofbulk products; it supposes the control of waiting lines, of flow rates measured in objects per
minute, etc., which are all techniques that have been more highly developed in mechanical
industries than in food processing. In many cases, the same plant has to produce a succession of
several batches of products in the same day, which means that flexibility is necessary, and this
may require robotization (in the sense of programmable mechanization), This may 1imit our
interest in investments in mechanization, robotization, and automation. To all of these specifics
may be added the fact that fuese operations so far have not been the objects of education and
academic research commensurate with fheir importance in industrial investments and with the
concerns of food plants operators, One important exception is packaging, which has received
SOrne attention in recent decades. This deficiency of research, however, has been aIleviated by
the transfer of technology from mechanical industries (products, robotization), These
considerations raise our awareness of the need to give mote importance to the topic of mechanics
in the food industry.

AUTOMATIC CONTROL

1t s well recognized today that control science is one of the important avenues for progress in fue
food industries," A review of applications and the potental of control science in the food
industries has been presented.' The main points and ideas are as follows. In parallel with heat and
mass fluxes, which ate classic for food engineers, the complexity of flow sheets implies that fluxes
of informati:on are essential aiJ;d must be taken into account. As it may appear from Figure 2.1,
the new objectives of production imply a necessary evolution frOIDmechanization (important for
'P(~ ductivity criteria) to control (important for quality and safety criteria). Withotjt control,
many processes cannot work. The consequence is that numerous studies have proposed fue
'introduotion of new sensors. Figure 2.3 proposes a set of available methods for sensor designo It
is important to remark that most of the progress today is being made using classical (simple-ro-
use) sensors in combination with computer-based applications. The direction of algorithm design
for control purposes is still under active development. Nevertheless, an important gap remains
between the level of laboratory