In Part I of this study, a method for the derivation of reduced-order models of food thermal processing was presented. In this second part, the capabilities and efficiency of this method is illustrated by applying it to the problems of design and optimization of thermal sterilization. The particular case of conduction-heated foods is considered, without loss of generality. The results clearly indicate that this new methodology allows very fast and accurate solutions of these problems, opening a whole new avenue of possibilities, especially for real-time optimization and control applications, Furthermore, the methodology can be applied to other food processes described by distributed models. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.