The growing demand for safer food and better nutritional and sensory quality creates the need for a better understanding of the processes involved in food production. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used by several authors for a better understanding of liquid food thermal process, one of the safest and most frequently used methods for food preservation. This study evaluated the condition of geometric symmetry used in numerical simulations of thermal process of packed liquid food via CFD. The analysis of temperature profiles obtained experimentally and through models built on 1/1, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32 of package geometry showed good correlation with the CFD simulations. The results indicate that the axial symmetry of the bottles allows the use of smaller models, which saves computational effort.o TEXTO COMPLETO DESTE ARTIGO, ESTARÁ DISPONÍVEL À PARTIR DE AGOSTO DE 2015.65