Question: When Processing food, and checking for corruptions in food, what kind of technology is used. is it human? are there computers to do this, or machines, or what???

Grant Campbell answered on 13 Mar 2013:

There are lots of different foods, and lots of different technologies used to manufacture them and to test their quality. In sophisticated food processing plants, these will be computer controlled – in smaller food preparation facilities, there will be a lot more human labour and manual control of machines.

For quality testing, high speed imaging is used a lot these days – point a camera at the food processing line, and use computing to analyse the image of each food item and report if there is a problem.

Types of technology for processing include:

– machines that separate agricultural products into their component parts in order to make ingredients (e.g. milling of wheat to separate flour from bran);
– machines that put ingredients together to make new foods (e.g. mixing flour, water, yeast and salt to make bread dough);
– machines that heat (baking ovens, fryers, pasteurisation and sterilisation systems);
– machines that cool (chillers and freezers;
– machines that package;
– and lots and lots of others!