Recent Advances in Food Process Engineering

Food manufacturing converts biological raw materials into safe, stable and palatable products through unit operations that were largely configured for throughput and shelf-life rather than for energy or material frugality. Process intensification offers a structured engineering response, promising smaller, faster, cleaner and better-integrated plants, yet its translation from chemical engineering into food production has been uneven and its evidential foundations have received limited critical scrutiny. This review examines how intensification principles have been interpreted, tested and contested in food manufacturing, and asks what the accessible evidence can legitimately support. Literature was identified through open scholarly indexes and citation searching, appraised for methodological adequacy and scale of demonstration, and synthesised thematically around the structural, energetic, synergistic and temporal dimensions of intensification. The strongest evidence concerns field-assisted pretreatments and electrically driven heating, where independent studies at pilot and factory scale report reproducible reductions in processing time, energy input and material loss. Evidence for separation and extraction intensification is abundant but dominated by small-scale, single-laboratory optimisation exercises whose energy and environmental claims frequently rest on incomplete system boundaries. Recurrent weaknesses limit inference across the field: matrix-dependent responses reported as general effects, comparators chosen without equivalent optimisation, treatment-chamber energy reported in place of specific energy consumption for the whole line, and microbiological validation conducted under conditions far removed from commercial operation. Adoption surveys indicate that capital intensity, validation burden and regulatory uncertainty constrain implementation more tightly than technical performance. Intensification in food manufacturing is best understood not as a catalogue of replacement technologies but as a redesign problem in which the unit operation, the product specification and the process chain are reconsidered together. Confidence in reported gains will remain conditional until scale-resolved energy accounting and independent replication become routine.