After World War II, solid state fermentations (SSF) in automated facilities developed rapidly in East Asia countries, especially Japan, to achieve a present annual market volume of about $ eight billion. In contrast, SSF, after having been introduced in Western countries at the onset of this century, became almost completely neglected. The comparative ease of running SSF bioreactors and in particular their low processing costs and considerably higher yields in comparison with submerged fermentation (STF) suggest that this technology might have great economic importance in producing food and pharmaceutically valuable substances such as antibiotics, anti-carcinogenic substances, antioxidants, flavors, fragrances, health foods, hypocholesterinemic agents, pigments, starter cultures, protein-enriched feed, thrombolytic enzymes, vasoactive agents, vitamins etc.