From Farm to Fork

Few goods are as important to us in our daily lives as food and drinks, and few goods are as complex to produce. Even the most common foodstuffs require a long and often global chain of production to go from field to plate: from the manufacturing, processing and refinement of raw materials to marketing, sales and the eventual consumption of the final product.

The Food Sciences M.Sc. programme focuses primarily on the study of this fascinating chain of production and its complex interactions within the context of the value chain. Through a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives you‘ll study foodstuffs not merely as consumable products, but rather within the sophisticated framework of the underlying, cross-disciplinary connections which form the production process. This leads to a broad expertise on the nature and production of foodstuffs not just from a technical point of view, but also in terms of quality assurance, nutrition, general product development and more.

From the very start, the degree programme places a strong emphasis on application-oriented research and methodology. In your first two semesters you‘ll focus on two semester-long projects which will provide many opportunities to apply your theoretical knowledge to interesting, real-world problems in food science. These research projects will also lay the groundwork for your master‘s thesis and subsequent colloquium in the 3rd semester, resulting in a sharply-defined specialisation and career profile after graduation.

Course Structure

This highly interdisciplinary study course incorporates a range of subjects from adjacent disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, horticulture and engineering, interwoven with scientific research questions taken from R&D, quality assurance and nutritional sciences. The applied research approach of this programme is apparent from the very beginning, with the two semester-long applied research projects in the first two semesters. The lion’s share of the third and final semester is taken up by the master’s thesis, which usually involves a more comprehensive scientific exploration of the applied research work.

Career Paths

As a graduate of the Food Sciences master‘s programme, your practical research experience and sound methodological competencies will enable you to expertly analyse and examine important foodstuffs-related aspects, from raw material production, to processing, to customer demands and expectations for products. The broad, multidisciplinary nature of your expertise is applicable in many different contexts, which opens the door to a wide range of possible career paths in a variety of sectors and industries.

Potential areas of employment for graduates are:

• Production plants
• Quality management
• Product safety institutes
• Monitoring and testing of foodstuffs
• Food-related research and development throughout the entire value chain