Cereals processing technology

1
Introduction
W. G. Owens, Satake Centre for Grain Process Engineering,
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
The cereal processing industry may be described as any industry that takes a
cereal or a cereal product as its raw material. Most cereal processes produce
foodstuffs but a few produce items such as starch for industrial or other uses.
Because of the importance of cereals in the human food chain, cereals
processing has evolved dramatically from humble beginnings as one of the
world’s oldest industries to the sophisticated one we know today. It took many
incremental advances to achieve today’s state of the art. This book aims to
highlight some of the more recent contributions to this continual evolution.
Why are cereals so dominant in the food sector? The answer is simple.
Cereals are a versatile and reliable source of food. They are easy to store and
may be used to produce a myriad of food products. Cereals processing thus
forms a large and important part of the food production chain. It also plays a
lesser, but no less important role in the non-food sector. It is for these reasons
that ways of improving cereal processing technology and practice need to be
addressed on a continual basis. There are many texts available, such as ‘Kent’s
Technology of Cereals’ that address the basic issues of cereals processing, but
there are few texts available that review the most recent developments in each
processing sector. This collection seeks to address this gap.
The world is becoming a more competitive place, with trade barriers being
removed and transportation becoming more efficient. This coupled with the
benefits of scale and efficiency that technological improvements have made
possible means that processing facilities are becoming larger and fewer in
number. Moreover, these plants are expected to operate with greater levels of
reliability over longer operating cycles. Within mainstream processes like flour
milling or bread baking, for example, the emphasis is still heavily towards
process efficiency and increased scale of operation to curtail processing cost.