What are the Advantages of Food Processing?

Food processing is a crucial tool in feeding the growing global population. Responsible food processing and ingredient re-formulation may as well boost the nutritional diversity of modern diets.

Fremont, CA: Throughout human history, man has been primarily restricted to ingesting foods that are readily available or that have been preserved in limited quantities via smoking, salting, and pickling. Processed, preserved foods were not commonly available until the Industrial Revolution and mass-production processes. Food processing has several advantages.

Advantages of food processing:

Food safety

People often take food safety for granted. They have use-by dates on perishable items that indicate how long they are safe to eat and labeled storage instructions to assist them in storing their food properly. Food processing activities such as pasteurization of milk, canning, or freeze-drying will have been utilized to ensure the food's safety.

Nutritional quality

Modern preservation techniques preserve not just the nutritional value of food, but also it's quality. Certain vitamins, for instance, rapidly lose nutritional value during storage, most notably due to oxidation. These critical nutrients are stabilized through preservation and packaging procedures. Additionally, manufacturers can utilize safe dietary additives to help prevent oxidation.

More availability and convenience

Food processing enables people to consume a wider variety of foods than their forefathers did. They are able to carry foods from all over the world to their homes because they can securely preserve and package them. They are not constrained by local production or seasonality, significantly increasing food availability and accessibility for the vast majority of people who reside in urban areas. Increased choice enables people to have a more diverse diet that is more likely to contain all of the nutrients necessary for optimum health. Due to the fact that food science enables people to understand how and why foods degrade in quality during storage, manufacturers may choose conditions that significantly increase storage times while retaining freshness.