Food is processed because in modern societies life no longer revolves around a family kitchen in which the household food is prepared freshly from raw ingredients.

We eat relatively few foods in a natural, raw state and very many of the most familiar foods are processed in one way or another – bread and cakes, pasta, mayonnaise, ice cream, beer, wine and spirits, chocolate, for example. Most of these foods could be prepared at home in the kitchen, but most people with busy lifestyles choose to buy them ready made from their local shop or supermarket.

Processed foods transported long distances from the point of manufacture and which spend time on the shelf before they are eaten have to be consumed within a specified shelf-life. The requirements of such food are bound to differ from foods cooked at home for immediate consumption.

Take a home-baked apple pie. Delicious when fresh, it will be less good on the second day when some of the juices have soaked into the pastry. With an off-the-shelf apple pie, it will always be several days old by the time it is eaten. So the question of keeping the pastry crust and the filling intact is a typical food-processing problem. And additives are part of the solution.

Food additives are needed to help maintain the taste, appearance and nutritional quality of processed food and keep it safe - bearing in mind the chain from production, through distribution and life on the shelf, to eventual consumption. The most important additives in these respects are preservatives, antioxidants, emulsifiers, flavourings and colours

The benefits of food processing are that it provides consumers with convenience and choice - a vast range of branded and own-label products foods, including low fat and low sugar foods, and an increasing variety of traditional and ethnic ready meals.

Food formulation is an art. It is the art a chef practises and it is the art a formulator practices in preparing food with a longer shelf life for the supermarket shelves. Until it happened, most people would have said that to put really tasty ready meals on the supermarket shelves was impossible. And even if they did no one would buy them. But much more is now known about the keeping properties of food and how to enhance them.