Good food is important for healthy life and can be prepared only out of clean grains, seeds and other raw food material. Day by day consumers are becoming more and more health and quality conscious not only about appearance but also about contamination. The basic raw material for the finished food products come from the farms and need to be separated from impurities and also categorization is important. Effective separation equipments and tools for cleaning are available in food industry. Depending on the type of industry, the separation operations could be grouped as : Precleaning,Fine Cleaning/Grading,special purpose separation process.

After separation of food material from foreign materials, its grading and washing or cleaning; it needs to be sterilized to free the food from any contamination. Nowadays, ozone is used preferably instead of sterilization process to kill bacteria. Sterilization results in softening of food, loss of some vitamins and water soluble nutrients. Whereas, ozone is very effective in killing pathogens and spoilage organisms and it leaves no other product except oxygen after it has done its work. Ozone is used to disinfect flour and can also be used to wash eggs, meat, fish ,poultry and to sanitize packaging materials used for the food storage.

It has been realized that packing is also an important link in the whole chain of processing. It is proper packaging that has increased the shelf life of food in India. New forms of packaging are coming up as shrink and stretch films and laminates, thermoformed containers, leak proof composite containers, multilayer film containers, retortable pouches, etc. After packing also, sterilization is carried out. But pasteurization is always preferred to sterilization as it maintains the taste and vitamin content of the product. During pasteurization, the products are cooked inside packaging. The temperature varies from 60 to 80 deg. depending on the product and the microorganisms to be neutralized.