Heat transfer in food processing: ensuring product quality and safety

Heat transfer to foods is commonplace but critical; heating develops flavour and texture and ensures product safety. The food industry must ensure that all parts of the product have all been processed sufficiently, without unacceptable loss of quality. Conventionally, food is significantly over-processed to ensure safety. This paper reviews some problems which heat-transfer engineers face in the food industry, and recent progress in understanding them. Examples are taken in (i) safety: the problems of predicting and validating food processes, using a combination of modelling, visualisation and enzyme temperature–time indicators which pass through a process and show how much cooking they have received, (ii) quality: the combination of reaction engineering and heat transfer in the generation of flavours and colours for ales, and (iii) process operation: how to clean food process plant.