A Decade of Eco-Friendly Active and Intelligent Food Packaging Research: A Quantitative Review

Abstract

The thrust for active and intelligent food packaging systems utilizing sustainable biopolymer resources has gained significant momentum in recent years as the global food industry seeks innovative solutions to enhance product freshness and safety while reducing environmental impact. Active packaging aims to extend the shelf life of packaged foods through the incorporation of substances. Intelligent packaging, on the other hand, is intended to offer up-to-date data on the quality, freshness, or safety of packaged foods by integrating various indicators into the packaging film that displays variations in storage conditions, gas levels, pH, and other factors. The present quantitative review is targeted to investigate quantitatively the research activity in the biodegradable multifunctional packaging utilizing the Web of Science database data. The top ten authors, countries, and journals associated with the present topic have been analyzed using the Bibliometrix-Biblioshiny package of R. This software package also utilizes the thematic evolution in terms of trend topic analysis. In addition, the VOS viewer software package has been used to predict inter-country collaboration, as well as, collaboration between authors. This software package also predicts co-occurrences and the evolution of keywords. Such an extensive computational approach thus expected to predict the grey areas in eco-friendly active and smart food packaging research both in terms of synthesis and properties.