Chemical Engineering Overview - Overview PDF - PowerPoint - Podcast

	B.S. - Chemical Engineering, Rutgers University
	Food engineer working in the soups and side dish area
	"You need to know how to write. Also, remember, the classes are the hardest part. Once you get through the classes, the job is easy -- you have a goal that you're working towards."

Rech: "A food engineer is a catchall title. It applies to all engineers who work in the process areas. So rather than having a Tea Engineer, or a Noodle Engineer, Pasta, Wishbone, you're a food engineer. Primarily I work in research, so I'm either doing, performing an experiment, or I'm tabulating the results, writing reports, or our area also does scale up, so we'll have plant visits where we'll experiment at the plant or even install new equipment for a plant process."

Q: What is a food engineer?
Rech: A food engineer is a catch-all title. It applies to all engineers who work in the process areas. So rather than having a tea engineer, or a noodle engineer, you're a food engineer.

Q: What are some of your daily job responsibilities?
Rech: I work primarily in research, so I'm either performing an experiment, I'm tabulating the results, or writing reports. Our area also does scale up, so we'll have plant visits where we'll experiment at the plant, or even install new equipment for a plant process.

Q: What courses did you take in college that help with what you're doing now?
Rech: I had a core chemical engineering background. I didn't know specifically what area I wanted to work in, so I didn't specialize in any particular area.

Q: Who are some of the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis?
Rech: We have other chemical engineers in the group. We also have mechanical engineers. Basically, we have people who are either very machine conscious, or are concerned about the product itself.

Q: What do you do in an R&D lab?
Rech: You're primarily making different variations of whatever item you're working on. Different formulations of salad dressing, or if you're making pasta or noodles, you'll have different amounts of egg, or you'll be making spinach pasta or some other vegetable item. So it's different formulations that you have to make, and you run them in the pilot plant, or benchtop. There's no real analytical equipment in the meals area. Moisture analysis is very important, viscosities are important -these are basic analytical tests for the food industry.

Q: How do you come up with these formulations?
Rech: It depends on what you're working on. You can create something from scratch. Generally, you will go through recipe books to find a flavor profile that you want. We also use market research where you'll take a name screen or you'll list several different varieties of food items-chicken and broccoli or stir fry-and you'll present them to consumers. Whichever ones are most popular will be selected. Then you'll formulate a different bunch of things to try to come up with a taste profile that everybody likes, and you pick one.

Q: What else do chemical engineers do in the food industry?
Rech: It's extremely varied, and it's much more intense than it might sound like. You're not baking chocolate chip cookies by the batch-they're on an industrial scale. Starch technology is very important. Emulsification technology is very important. When you're making a salad dressing that sits on the shelf, you don't want it to separate. So that's very important. You use spray-drying equipment to make instant tea. Pneumatically conveying food is difficult. Sugar tends to become cubes. So there are lots of places where your chemical engineering background comes into play.

Q: What were some of the things that you did, while in college, that helped you get to where you are today?
Rech: Most of my summer work was done in the pharmaceutical industry. And that was very, very helpful, because you had to write reports, and you had to have your notebook organized, witnessed, and signed. You finally got to see, not just the technical aspect of your job, but how you interact with all the other people who need your work. That was very important; so summer work was very helpful. The pharmaceutical industry and food industry are called clean industries. So a lot of the equipment is very much the same.

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