The simple definition of the whole food sector is that food processing takes clean, freshly harvested crops or freshly butchered animal products, and uses them to produce attractive, marketable food products, with an adequate shelf life. Similarly beverage processing takes clean fresh water and, with appropriate admixture of fruit and vegetable components, uses it to make a wide range of drinks products with global appeal. Foodstuffs, whether raw materials, or final products, are easily denatured during processing, so that a filtration process is advantageous because it usually occurs at little higher than room temperature. Separation equipment has two primary functions within these tasks: to keep the processes, food or beverage, as free as possible from harmful micro-organisms, and to prepare the raw ingredients in their best state to produce the right formulation for inclusion in a final product or for subsequent processing. The hygiene task requires similar kinds of equipment to that employed in the pharmaceutical sector, or in medical and health processing: the major problem being to prevent entrance of micro-organisms into the processing zones or packaging areas. The separation equipment used for this purpose will mostly be very fine cartridge filters in HEPA or ULPA grades, or membrane filters. It follows that one of the most important characteristics of the separation equipment used in the food and beverage industries is the need for it to be able to operate in a state of scrupulous cleanliness. Contact surfaces will normally be of polished stainless steel, and the whole equipment should be easily cleaned, preferably by some kind of clean-in-place process. The cleaning processes must allow sufficient residence time for the solutions to do their job. Square corners, dead ends and threaded joints should be avoided in contact with process materials, and surfaces should be sloped so that liquids may drain from them. Care must be exercised for process materials that involve salt solutions, as these can attack stainless steel, so glass-lined equipment may be preferred. To offset this need for high quality materials in food and beverage processing, it is mostly true that equipment for this sector does not have to withstand the severe processing conditions found in some chemical or pharmaceutical operations. Indeed the most severe operating parameters may well be those involved in steam sterilisation or an aggressive clean-in-place solution.