The drying of paddy rice may result in quality degradation, expressed as a head kernel yield, leading to significant commercial depreciation of the product. A mathematical model of the drying and of the quality degradation process was combined with a dynamic optimization algorithm to determine the drying conditions (air temperature and relative humidity as functions of time) that ensured the highest possible final product quality for a specified drying time and a specified final moisture content. The robustness of the optimal drying strategy with respect to the initial state of the product, to the model parameters and to the initialization of the optimization algorithm was verified. The compromise between the highest achievable final quality and the allowed total drying time was studied. The combination of simulation and optimization yielded a new insight in the rice drying process and in the quality preservation strategies.