Smart Packaging for Managing and Monitoring Shelf Life and Food Safety

Abstract

The food packaging industry has grown rapidly in the past few decades since the progress of intelligent and active packaging. However, as a niche in a highly competitive food industry, the development of smart packaging systems has been impelled to meet the customer needs in recent years. Smart packaging systems integrating both active and intelligent packaging tools offer multiple ways to increase the quality and safety of food products, aside from their primary functions of protecting foodstuffs and keeping them hygienic against undesirable physical, chemical, and biological injury. The indicators and sensors as smart packaging components are employed for real-time food safety control, along with informing the retailers and customers about the microbial load, product’s freshness, temperature, and shelf life. Thus, for tracking food quality and safety such innovations would give rise to several sensor designs, such as freshness indicators, leakage indicators, time-temperature indicators (TTIs), etc. Radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags and barcodes are also used for real-time details about traceability in the food packaging supply chain. This chapter addresses the most important smart packaging developments that can enhance products’ shelf life, including approaches existing in the market and the advances of packaging systems. It also illustrates the latest technological innovations and present technical research overviews, providing opportunities for improving smart food packaging systems.