Intelligent Food Packaging: A Review of Smart Sensing Technologies for Monitoring Food Quality

Abstract

Food safety is a major factor affecting public health and the well-being of society. A possible solution to control food-borne illnesses is through real-time monitoring of the food quality throughout the food supply chain. The development of emerging technologies, such as active and intelligent packaging, has been greatly accelerated in recent years, with a focus on informing consumers about food quality. Advances in the fields of sensors and biosensors has enabled the development of new materials, devices, and multifunctional sensing systems to monitor the quality of food. In this Review, we place the focus on an in-depth summary of the recent technological advances that hold the potential for being incorporated into food packaging to ensure food quality, safety, or monitoring of spoilage. These advanced sensing systems usually target monitoring gas production, humidity, temperature, and microorganisms' growth within packaged food. The implementation of portable and simple-to-use hand-held devices is also discussed in this Review. We highlight the mechanical and optical properties of current materials and systems, along with various limitations associated with each device. The technologies discussed here hold great potential for applications in food packaging and bring us one step closer to enable real-time monitoring of food throughout the supply chain.

Enhancing Pharmaceutical Packaging through a Technology Ecosystem to Facilitate the Reuse of Medicines and Reduce Medicinal Waste

“…Intelligent packaging has been a major research topic in the food industry and many of its technologies can also be applied in pharmaceutical packaging. The literature review suggests that the main purpose for intelligent food packaging focuses on monitoring the freshness of the food content rather than observing the storage condition of the medicines in pharmaceutical packaging [40]. Deterioration of the packaged food is basically the major concern in the food industry.…”

“…Application of technologies to these concepts, especially the environmental condition monitoring, is closely resembled to the pharmaceutical counterpart where the sensors are measuring the surroundings of pharmaceutical packaging rather than the space inside food packaging. Sensing technologies based on chemical, biological or physical sensors are the core components in intelligent food packaging enabling passive or active indications of the status of the packaged food to consumers [40,41]. Collection of articles was first focused on technologies applying directly to pharmaceutical packaging, but those that applied to food packaging were also chosen in this study when no relevant article was found in the pharmaceutical sector.…”

Bio-Based Smart Materials for Food Packaging and Sensors – A Review

“…However, modern technology and materials science have introduced new "smart" functions to food packages, which include advanced packaging materials with improved properties, and sensors that can monitor food quality (Yam et al, 2005;Kuswandi et al, 2011). Over the years, several approaches toward smart packaging have been demonstrated including time-temperature indicators, modified atmosphere packaging sensors for CO 2 and O 2 monitoring, total volatile base nitrogen sensors to detect food decay, fruit ripeness indicators, pathogen sensors, and solutions for food tracking and authentication (RFID tags) (Fuertes et al, 2016;Ghaani et al, 2016;Ahmed et al, 2018;Badia-Melis et al, 2018;Galstyan et al, 2018;Mustafa and Andreescu, 2018;Yousefi et al, 2019).…”

In-Situ Ellipsometric Study of the Optical Properties of LTL-Doped Thin Film Sensors for Copper(II) Ion Detection

“…Sensors are being developed for every possible aspect of modern life, ranging from the detection of air pollutants [1] and food contaminants [2], monitoring health biomarkers [3,4], and even assisting in the detection of extra-terrestrial life [5]. There are many characteristics of an effective sensor, including high sensitivity, selectivity, high signal-to-noise ratio, fast response time, and reliability/stability.…”