By 1900 food technology was firmly established in Australia. Nobody called it that because it was seen as the introduction to and establishment in the colonies of food processing equipment and processes which, with one or two exceptions, had not been available to the original colonists. Thus, the technology of sugar milling and refining, though well known in the tropics, was not available in England, heat processing emerged only in the first decade of the nineteenth century from the work of Appert in the 1790s and refrigeration and the revolution in milling and dairy manufacture were later nineteenth century developments.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of great advance. Refrigerated transport, roller milling, cream separation and mechanical dehydration were introduced but they were all examples of engineering cleverness rather than the application of broadly based principles of food technology. At that time the application of chemistry and microbiology was only dimly perceived. It increased, especially between the wars, but it was not until the 1940s that the next great revolution occurred under the impact of the full scale application of science to problems of food production, processing and handling.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering