The division's vision is to enhance national and house-hold food security by way of reducing post-harvest food losses through development, adoption, adaptation and transfer of appropriate food processing and storage technologies. Its mission is to reduce post-harvest food losses through process and product development.

Objectives

• Develop, adapt and/or adopt and disseminate appropriate food processing technologies.
• Minimize post-harvest food losses through promotion of processing and utilization of locally available traditional and horticultural foods to reduce dependency on food importation.
• Train micro and small-scale enterprises [MSEs] to enable them produce quality and value added food products able to meet local demands and to penetrate the internationally competitive markets.
• Create adequate human resources and technological capacity to cope with the demands of a rapidly growing food industry as Kenya moves towards NIC status.
• Collaborate with local and international institutions, government ministries, donor community, non-governmental organizations [NGOs] Community based organizations [CBOs] etc in the commercialization of appropriate food processing technologies.
• Providing other tailor-made technical services as per customers’ requirements.

Service Offered

• Promotion of processing and utilization of traditional and horticultural food crops.
• Providing consultancy and training services including HACCP training to the food industry [with particular emphasis on micro and small-scale enterprises MSMs.]
• Development, adaptation and/or adoption and dissemination of appropriate food processing technologies.
• Product and process development on pilot scale [at KIRDI] including limited production runs for market research and development of innovative products and processes.
• Commercialization of technologies for processing traditional and horticultural food crops through setting up of pilot plants