To facilitate the technological processing of food at the educational and commercial levels, food- processing professionals have developed unifying principles and a systematic approach to the study of these operations. The involved processes of the food industry can be divided into a number of common operations, called unit operations. Depending on the processor, such unit operations vary in name and number. For ease of discussion, we use the following units of operations, in alphabetical order, for the most common ones: cleaning, coating, controlling,
decorating, disintegrating, drying, evaporating, forming, heating, mixing, packaging, pumping, raw materials handling, and separating.
During food processing, the manufacturer selects and combines unit operations into unit processes, which are then combined to produce more complex and comprehensive processes. We will now discuss these units in the order they appear in a food processing plant. Although emerging technology plays an important role in food processing as time progresses, this book is designed to provide students with the most basic approaches.