The presence of strong disturbances usually causes great performance degradation of industrial process control systems. A disturbance observer (DOB) enhanced composite cascade control consisting of model predictive control (MPC), proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, and DOB is proposed in this paper. DOB is employed here to estimate the severe disturbances and the estimated values are applied for feed-forward compensation, forming a composite control together with MPC. To evaluate the efficiency and validity of the proposed control structure, the simulation as well as experimental studies have been carried out for a level tank process which represents a typical first-order plus dead-time (FODT) industry process. Both the simulation and experimental results show that the proposed composite control method significantly improves the disturbance attenuation property of the MPC scheme in controlling such a typical industrial process.