From the farm to the fork and from the store to the stove, food process engineering firms help feed the world.
The expertise that the following ‘Big 3’ firms provide is critical for food processing facilities to achieve hygienic conditions, regulatory compliance, and to ensure the high-quality treats and beverages that consumers have grown to love.
Food Manufacturing Trends in The United States
Production agility is necessary now more than ever in an uncertain food environment. Raw material costs are increasing, supply chains are wobbling, and tariffs create obstacles for manufacturers to overcome.
Food will always command a huge chunk of paychecks. US households allocated almost 13% of their budgets to food in 2024 — the third-largest expenditure after transportation and housing, according to the USDA.
Despite the supposed efficacy of the proverbial crystal ball, forecasting future trends may be impossible. So agility is essential. For example, an avian influenza epidemic in 2022 drove up egg prices in early 2025, resulting in a nearly 22% increase compared with 2024.
Finally, the global food culture is experiencing a seemingly permanent structural shift, as consumers crave convenience.
As a result, Future Market Insights projects that the global ready-to-eat (RTE) food market will surge from $213.92 billion in 2025 to $515.80 billion by 2035.
#1. DeJong Consulting LLC
DeJong Operations Management & Consulting LLC leads the way in dairy, egg, and liquid processing. We unite 15 years of industry experience and merge modern analytical methods to help clients maximize their return on investment (ROI).
At DeJong Consulting, we’re equally adept at helping food producers, whether they require remodeling, reconfiguration, or building a facility from the ground up.
A customer-first mentality employs evidence-based assessments to guide food production plants from RD to production, implementing skids and automated technologies to increase uptime and minimize errors.
Here’s one major money-saving method: rethinking cold storage facilities to capitalize on a rapid rise. The cold chain logistics market is expected to exceed $410 billion by 2028.
And in a tough regulatory environment, DeJong Consulting formulates Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plans tailored to each client’s facilities.
We also tackle the universal problems of food processing: the challenges of cleaning and of driving costs down efficiently without hurting quality.
There are areas where we have become leaders.
For example, we often step in for smaller companies when there is a shortage of specialized engineering expertise. Our crews are used to seeing our engineering go live and are attuned to where the math can be adjusted to meet real-world performance.
We’re also being called in to update outdated equipment and poor plant layouts. Addressing these concerns enables manufacturers to meet rising demand while optimizing materials and energy use, turning food facilities into eco-friendly powerhouses.
And, nothing would happen without robust sanitation standards to keep things clean. This includes integrating automated clean-in-place (CIP) systems and manual clean-out-of-place (COP) protocols to provide unmatched freshness in every sip.
#2. ISG Group
Founded in 1973, ISG is a multidisciplinary engineering firm. It serves clients nationwide across the food and beverage processing industry.
To support optimal manufacturing builds in dairy, poultry, and egg, ISG employs greenfield site selection. Construction analyses inform new plant builds. Alternatively, renovations enable existing facilities to pursue more varied production lines through the application of manufacturing best practices.
For example, ISG designed an 85,000-square-foot ice cream facility for the Good Humor-Breyers, a Unilever brand. This long-term partnership also led to the design of a 90,000-square-foot facility add-on to increase production capacity.
ISG is also currently partnering with Bel Group in a major, $200 million expansion of the Babybel® factory in Brookings, South Dakota. This project doubles the dairy processing factory’s size and production capacity while keeping it fully operational and modernizing its utility infrastructure.
ISG’s influence stretches from food factories to farms, thanks to the expertise endowed by its in-house permitting and environmental team. As a result, agricultural producers can get more of their products to consumers’ forks by optimizing handling and storing practices, adhering to CAFO, NPDES, and other regulatory standards.
A modern approach helps: Warehousing, distribution, and cold storage represent vital workflows that can be streamlined through automated storage and retrieval systems to accelerate warehousing, handling, and shipping processes.
It’s no surprise that we often collaborate with ISG as two powerhouse leaders in the industry.
#3. Foth
Since 1938, Foth has leveraged science, engineering, and tech innovations to supercharge food manufacturers’ ROI.
Infrastructure, environmental, and production capacity evaluations provide a blueprint to enact complex builds on tight schedules and resource constraints.
For example, by skillfully strategizing corporate governance and procurement standards, Foth helped secure millions of dollars in cost avoidance on a $30 million refrigeration project for a major U.S. food client.
Foth renovations are informed by big data analysis via IoT (internet of things) devices and other methods to improve clients’ sourcing, production, and distribution capacities — because keeping pace with capricious consumer demands is key to maintaining profitability and avoiding a major pitfall: lapsing into outdated legacy systems.
Additionally, Foth employs a proprietary Serial 1 Automation strategy, focused on customized, scalable automation solutions that transcend off-the-shelf ideas: an upgrade of a Wisconsin-based food producer’s historical line yielded a 20% increase in production speed and a tenfold reduction in product defects.
While there are a handful of companies to choose from in the food process engineering field, we at DeJong Consulting are proud to consistently be listed as a leading brand on new facility building projects.