More than 70% of all agricultural goods currently produced in the European Union gets transformed into manufactured food products, and this trajectory is set to intensify as food manufacturing processes increasingly integrate the multiple fractionation, assembly and formulation steps required to propose a vast array of food products with specific properties. This increasing rate of food processing in addition to the increasing complexity of food manufacturing forces the food industry to address its impact on the environment. This talk presents the main approaches for ecodesigning food manufacturing processes. The first approach, based on minimizing material flows (particularly energy and water) within the process, either via modifications to operating conditions or via a redistribution or reuse of the flows within the process, is widely implemented at the industrial level. The second approach, based on comparative environmental assessment of either different processes or different scenarios for a particular process that is then iteratively improved, is starting to be used. This approach typically employs life cycle assessment to single out the most environment-negative processes and unit operations to help guide process engineers towards an improved design. New approaches based on modeling, simulation-optimization ecodesign approaches are also emerging. Only these approaches integrate the notion of compromise between different technological, economic and environmental objectives (minimizing key process-related quantities, i.e. inputs (water, energy and chemicals), environmental impacts and the related costs, while maximizing productivity and product properties) by co-optimizing conflicting objectives, and tease out the optimal solutions. These approaches will be illustrated with examples taken from the dairy sector, and explicitly discussed with respect to the potential rewards and challenges of their respective application.