Processing is the necessary condition to have all year round a diversity of safe, nutricious and delicious foods. How did processes develop from mastery of fire to high pressure processing? Since when are additives recognized and regulated as such? This article summarizes the development of food processing, in terms of technologies and organization, and some of its key turning points. From the Neolitic to the XVIIIth century, domestic and artisanal preparation and stabilization of foods using ancestral methods such as drying, cooking, fermenting, allowed more or less availability of foods, but in a context of scarcity, unsecurity and dietary deficits. Food industries, regulated to ensure food safety, emerged during the XIXth century to produce constant, tasty and practical products. A second phase of rapid changes in the available processes and food products occured during the second half of the XXth century, marked by abundant agricultural production, cheap energy and the generalization of cold chains until the consumers' homes. The second part of the article presents some emblematic classes of additives and processing aids, as well as their legislation. Food processing is strongly reglemented both for safety and commercial equity, and this interaction with legislation may either slow innovation or on the opposite incite it to find new solutions. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of Societe francaise de nutrition.