Food Safety Engineering: An Emergent Perspective

In general, food engineers are trained to solve engineering problems in the food industry. More specifically, the food engineer must specify the functional requirements, design, and testing of food products, and finally, the evaluation of products to check for overall efficiency, cost, reliability, and most importantly, safety. Food safety must be considered foremost as the overall engineering problem encountered in the food supply chain, and it must be solved from a food safety engineering perspective. This article will show that the food safety engineering perspective is needed in order to produce high quality food products (minimally processed) that are both safe and secure. This multi-disciplinary approach will involve certain engineering components: (i) predictive microbiology as a tool to evaluate and improve food safety in traditional and new processing technologies, (ii) advanced food contaminants detection methods, (iii) advanced processing technologies, (iv) advanced systems for re-contamination control, (v) advanced systems for active and intelligent packaging.