I am a real eater, a muncher, a grinder; a chomper, a foodie as my colleagues at work like to say (in other words I bore the hell out of them discussing cooking, drinks, food history, strange edibles and the like).

This week I?m getting closer to the action covering an exhibition on food processing technology in Cologne, Germany.

Here at this city straddling the Rhine, the Anuga FoodTech exhibition gets right down to the grease of food making, the machines that process and churn out most of the food we currently eat.

We?re not talking kitchen-sized blenders here folks, but industrial scale machinery doing everything from loading meat on to skewers, to an entire robotic sausage-making and packing line.

On some of the floor areas, entire processing and packaging lines have been set up. Others in a test supermarket area are making people don heavy shades, gloves and coats to determine their reactions to packaging in a bid to determine how to make the shopping experience friendly for older people.

Automating food making is an extremely difficult task as I?ve found out over the past eight months of covering the processing industry.

Just how do you get cooked pasta moving along a line and into packages, without everything becoming glutinous? This seemingly simple task for a simple dish is actually a nightmare for food processors.

Get it wrong and a food maker can cause masses of people to get extremely sick from pathogens, or even kill someone.

And while the sight of the latest sausage extruder may lead to a vomiting fit if you see what ingredients undergo before arriving pink and well turned out at your local grocers, there is lots to be hopeful about the state of processed food industry.

For there is a real revolution going on in industrial food making, pushed by consumer demand for more ?atural? or ?minimally processed? foods, ones that use little or no preservatives or additives or quality-destroying heat processing techniques to maintain shelf life.

In a sense the trend is contradictory. Additives, preservatives and chemicals help extend the shelf life of food products, giving us safer products.

Taking those away gives the pathogens a chance at multiplying to poisonous levels. The ability to do away with the additives in ?minimally? processed foods is made possible by newly developing technologies, such as aseptic packaging, or robotics, which take out the human element in the contamination chain.

Aseptic processing is especially interesting. Aseptic cold filling requires the separate sterilisation of the product, bottles or cartons, and their closures.

The sterilised product is then packaged in a sealed-off sterile environment and the container sealed under aseptic conditions.

It takes an enormous amount of equipment to keep a plant room sterile enough for the process. Even the air must be sterilised before it enters.

Many of the machine makers here at Anuga FoodTec are attempting to integrate aseptic process technology in filling operations from start to finish.

Some of the systems involve designing mixing and pasteurisation in one process. Heat transfer plates and pipes that make it easy to kill micro-organisms come into play.

But the future of the food industry perhaps can be seen in an entire sausage making and packing line set up by about 20 robot manufacturers who pooled together to demonstrate the technology for the first time.

This was run by two workers, who basically fed the operation sausage meat, casings and packaging materials after pressing a button.

In an aseptic section, meat is fed into a hopper and is funnelled down one part of the line to be fed into casings. The sausages then tumble on to another conveyor belt at 200 a minute.

So far this is like any other automated production line. They remain in a closed aseptic system and pass under a special scanning light scattered haphazardly on the conveyor belt.

The information is sent immediately to two crab like robots, each with three arms. The robots pick up the individual sausages and place them five at a time in individual packs.

The packs pass through a sealing machine, where the air is removed and replaced with an inert gas such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The removal of oxygen gives the sausages a longer shelf life at stores.

Covered with a plastic film, the packages move to another machine that labels and weighs them to ensure they come within the correct range.

The packages move down the line where another robot picks them up four at a time and places them into a carton.

Once the carton is full, a larger robot arm, something like we are used to seeing in car factories, picks it up and places it on a wooden pallet.

Once 50 cartons are on the pallet, another robot takes over, wraps film completely around it and places it at the end of the line, ready to roll into trucks and off to the grocery store.

Quick, pass the mustard.

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