ABSTRACT
Commercial Food Processing converts raw agricultural or animal materials into edible intermediate or consumer food products through application of technology and labor. Farm and marine raw materials are converted to more refined, concentrated, convenient, nutritious, and more palatable food products. Large amounts of food products are processed world-wide to feed the expanding population and satisfy the consumer nutrition requirement and organoleptic preferences. Economics plays an important role in supplying sufficient quantities of food products at affordable prices, while providing considerable profit to the food producers, processors, and distributors. Food Plant Economics is a special subject of the field of Process Economics, which deals with the economic analysis of various Process Industries (Holland and Wilkinson, 1997). Economics plays an important role in the design and operation of industrial processes and processing plants (Peters et al., 2003; Couper, 2003). The design and optimization of food processes is based on the application of Food Science principles to the established techniques of Chemical Process Design. Simplified computer-aided techniques, such as the Excel spreadsheets, have been applied to the design of several food processes (Maroulis and Saravacos, 2003). Food processes, based on heat and mass transfer, such as heating, refrigeration/freezing, evaporation, dehydration, thermal processing, and mass transfer separations, can be analyzed, designed, and optimized quantitatively, using published engineering data, particularly transport properties of food materials. The design of mechanical processes and separations of solid and semisolid food materials, such as mechanical transport and storage, size reduction
and enlargement, mixing and forming, mechanical separation of food parts, mechanical expression, and mechanical cleaning, are designed empirically, based mostly on technical data and specialized processing equipment, provided by equipment manufacturers and suppliers (Saravacos and Kostaropoulos, 2002). Food Plant Design is an optimum integration of Food Process Design, Equipment Design, and Process Engineering Economics. In addition, the requirements of appropriate plant buildings and hygienic (sanitary) operation should be considered (Lopez-Gomez and Barbosa-Canovas, 2005). Food Processing is characterized by some important peculiarities, such as variability and sensitivity of the raw materials, and strict safety requirements of the food products. Hygienic design and operation and food safety precede any other engineering and economic consideration of food processing plants.
