It is foreseeable that in a short period of time some of the nutritional criteria used currently will start to change. For example, some time ago it was questioned that a low-fat diet may be clearly associated with an improved lipid profile of plasma, genetic factors being those that regulate the susceptibility to determined plasma lipoprotein profiles. The rigorous design of functional foods requires ascertaining on a molecular level the mechanisms of biological activity of their components and bases of diseases to which they are directed. Genomics studies genes and their functions. Up to now various hundreds of human genes related to very serious diseases have been identified. It is now known that one of the molecular bases of cancer, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases and others are due to interactions between various genes and between these and certain environmental factors. The genetic factor determines the susceptibility of individuals to suffer these diseases and environmental factors specify which of the susceptible individuals will develop them. Diet is an environmental factor of maximum importance.

Currently, the population is fully aware of the importance food has on the state of health. This is due to significant scientific progress in this regard and its broad dissemination. Society now not only demands tasty and nutritional food but also demands healthy (beyond the classical nutritional concept), safe ("0 risk") and easy to prepare products.

There are advanced techniques that are capable of being applied to the development of precise and automated monitoring and control systems, for the different stages and transformations that occur in the processes of the agrofood chain. All this makes it necessary to develop in-depth scientific knowledge on the chemical, physical, physiological and biotic phenomena involved in these processes and the models of behaviour of live vegetable or animal material in any of the productive stages with the aim of designing applications based on already existing advanced techniques that make this knowledge possible with the aim of supervision, prediction and control; as well as appropriate technologies that should be industrially viable.