Institute of Food Technologists

The Institute of Food Technologists or IFT is an international, non-profit professional organization for the advancement of food science and technology. It is the largest of food science organizations in the world, encompassing 22,000 members worldwide as of 2006. It is referred to as "THE Society of Food Science and Technology." Its current president is Robert B. Gravani of Cornell University. As food technology grew from the individual family farm to the factory level, including the slaughterhouse for meat and poultry processing, the cannery for canned foods, and bakeries for bread as examples, the need to have personnel trained for the food industries did also. Literature such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 1906 about...