Master's in Food Technology

Ghent University is a public university in Ghent, Belgium. It was founded in 1817 and is one of the largest universities in Belgium. The university has over 40,000 students and 6,000 staff members. It offers a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs in the fields of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, and engineering. Ghent University is ranked #121-130 in the QS World University Rankings 2024. It is also a member of the League of European Research Universities and the Coimbra Group.

The general objective of IUPFOOD is to provide a multidisciplinary and specialised professional training in areas of food technology, with emphasis on postharvest and food preservation engineering on the one hand and food science and technology on the other hand, to equip future personnel with the necessary technological and managerial knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which are required to successfully contribute to solving problems related to food security. The IUPFOOD programme particularly focuses on developing countries where food security (delivering enough nutritiou­s, high-quality safe food) is a current and future major concern and key challenge. Today it is recognised that post-production considerations or activitie­s such as postharvest handling, storage, processing, preservatio­n, marketing, distribution and utilizations need to form part of agricultural development programmes because there are many opportunities for food to be lost between harvest and consumption. These postharvest food losses represent a loss of valuable nutrients and money, especially in developing countries. Food should not only be produced, it should also be delivered to the ultimate consumer in an acceptable form if it is to fulfil its nutritional destiny. To bring foods to the consumer in an acceptable form, on the one hand processing technologies are used to convert edible raw materials into foods with decreased inherent stability; on the other hand preservation technologies are required to increase the stability and shelf life of foods. Based on these considerations, two technological dimensions of prime and crucial importance in food processing and preservation are the key objectives and programme options in IUPFOOD: the transformation (processing) of raw materials into products suited for human consumption and the role of postharvest and food preservation unit operations in delivering safe and nutritious foods to the end consumer. These two concerns are directly translated in the focus points of the IUPFOOD training programme.