Increasing oil temperature and heating duration in deep-fat frying of potato chips can improve textural quality but worsen the chemical safety of acrylamide formation. Optimal design of this complex process is formulated as a non-linear constrained optimization problem where the objective is to compute the oil temperature profile that guarantees the desired final moisture content while minimizing final acrylamide content subject to operating constraints and the process dynamics. The process dynamics uses a multi-component and multiphase transport model in the potato as a porous medium taken from literature. Results show that five different heating zones offer a good compromise between process duration (shorter the better) and safety in terms of lower acrylamide formation. A short, high temperature zone at the beginning with a progressive decrease in zone temperatures was found to be the optimal design. The multi-zone optimal operating conditions show significant advantages over nominal constant temperature processes, opening new avenues for optimization. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.