The most common area of work is product development with research, quality assurance, regulatory relations, packaging and manufacturing as secondary. Product development involves creating new food products for the market. While a person often thinks of QA as being routine analysis, QA is now also responsible for trouble shooting in food manufacturing. Regulatory work is most commonly associated with assuring that a company's products meet all legal requirements locally, nationally and internationally. This work requires an individual who is well versed in all aspects of food formulation and stability, analysis, and the law.
Packaging is a growing work area in the food industry.
These new opportunities come with problems that must be addressed through research. One must emphasize a growing challenge and that is the global nature of the food industry. Today and more so tomorrow, every aspect of food science that was geared to local or national markets must be expanded to include the global market. This is true of market taste preferences, cultural and religious influences, ingredient availability, storage conditions, distribution structure, legal regulations, language barriers, etc. The global challenge extends to academics as well as industry.