Institute of Food Technology

Food Technology - Institute of Food Technology - The Institute of Food Technology (IFT) is a society of and for professional people involved in food and agriculture, nutrition and health around the world. The Institute of Food Technology defines food technology as the application of science and engineering to the production, processing, packaging, distribution, preparation and utilization of foods.

Applications may involve solving problems in the development of products, processes or equipment; selecting raw materials; defining and controlling fundmental changes in composition or physical condition prior to, duting and subsequent to idustrial processing; ot ensuring the nutritional value and wholesomeness of foods.

Knowlegde of food technology enables its prosessor to solve technnological problems in one or more of these fields.

The building blocks are drawn from the fields of chemistry, biology, physics, social sciences, engineering and agriculture.

Food technology is concerned with research, development and and operations. Food research may involve discovering new phenomena about foods and ingredients. Food development may involve making conventional foods in new and better ways or making new foods. Any one of these pursuits may involve desin or testing the properties of materials; determining requirements for equipment; or assuring the convenience, control and economics of operations. All involve considerations of the nutritional consequences or the impacts of foods laws on final products.

Food science, on the other hand, has been defined as the field or fundamental investigation into the basic phenomena of foods and food components.

There is a school of thought that look at food science and food technology not as two separate subjects but merely broad divisions of what is, in truth, a continous spectrum. Undoubtedly the relations of food science and food technology are subtle and complex. In Great Britain, the intoduction of courses in food science and in food tecchnology as two separate disciplines. This development has been reinforced by the structure of the british food industry which has enabled two professions to establish themselves. The foundation of the (British) Institute of Food Science and Technology in the 1960’s took note of this fact by stating in its official brochure that this professional body was sit up “as a necessary step to enable he collective views of those engaged in these professions to be effective in implementing the aims” of the institute.