In this paper, a novel evolutionary approach, the ants foraging mechanism (AFM), that effectively overcomes local optima is presented for the solution of the optimal design of multiproduct batch chemical processes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AFM in solving the proposed problem, four examples adopted from the literature are presented, together with the computation results. Satisfactory results are obtained in comparison with the results of mathematical programming (MP), tabu search (TS), genetic algorithm (GA), and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm.