Characteristics of food engineering that collectively distinguish it from other professional engineering activities and tie it to food technology include:

• the outcomes of the process must be describable in sensory as well as compositional terms - the physical structure (texture) must be preserved or enhanced during processing,
• the food is a continuous and complex reaction system whose behaviour must be modelled by appropriate kinetic equations at all stages of its life - it is rarely possible to separate kinetics from heat, mass and momentum transfer processes in analyses of specific operations,
• food engineering is more than food process engineering - it also includes materials handling and packaging operations associated with getting product into retail packs, and this requires mechanical/production engineering skills,
• ethical considerations are multi-faceted - as well as the safety of the engineering systems, there is the need to ensure that people are protected from food-borne hazards, and there are considerations of what may ethically be added to products ingested by a community with wide-ranging dietary needs,
• capital expenditure decisions tend to require performance verification more than one-off custom design calculations - the learning curves for hygienic design, and the highly specialised materials handling operations (e.g. corn cob de-husking) found in the food industry mean that it is often unrealistic to use first principles design,
• leading on from the above, and in common with some other branches of engineering, there is a need for a systems approach regarding scheduling of intermittent and/or batch operations, cleaning etc., and this systems approach needs also to consider the inter-connectability of plant sourced from quite different suppliers.