Can Fick law‐based models accurately describe migration within a complete food product life cycle?

Abstract

The concept of migration from polymeric packaging materials to food and food simulants, under the environmental conditions expected during the food products' complete life cycle, is discussed here. The most broadly approved models that cope migration as a diffusion-driven process have been neglecting more complicated mass transport mechanisms, and environmental involvement that are occurring in parallel or simultaneously in the whole system. It is the aim of this work to consider these models and weight them against their extensive use. After having identified the areas of inadequacies of usage in validating migration during food process applications affecting food quality rather than safety, this work shall outline and propose specific and eventually more complete directions, for future modeling approaches regarding the food–packaging interactions, comprehensively involving the storage environment in terms of both conditions and constituents. Practical applications Several papers have indicated differences between experimental observations and theoretical predictions, while through a significant research effort the parameters' values for achieving better agreement have been, so far, estimated. This work aims to go beyond the consideration of the diffusion process as being the single mechanism to describe the migration from packaging to foodstuffs, but rather proposes to incorporate more complicated phenomena (sorption, surface reactions, etc.) to overcome the above-mentioned discrepancies. In that sense, potential future models, may then allow for a comprehensive food quality control, compared to the presently acceptable packed food safety reassurance.