Recent advances in self‐healing materials for food packaging

Abstract

Food packaging materials are often inevitably and imperceptibly damaged during the transportation, handling, and storage, and the disruption of their integrity poses a challenge to food preservation. Food packaging materials with self‐healing capability can automatically repair the damaged areas and reconstruct original properties to avoid degradation of food quality and loss of nutrients. Various self‐healing materials based on dynamic covalent bonds and/or dynamic non‐covalent interactions have been developed and applied in food packaging in the forms of films and coatings at laboratory scale, and more efforts are required for the commercialization of these novel smart packaging materials. This is the first review to summarize the recent progress in the preparation of self‐healing packaging materials through different mechanisms, compare the self‐healing efficiency under different conditions, and highlight the potential applications of self‐healing films and coatings with recoverable mechanical and barrier properties and other functionalities (e.g., antimicrobial and anti‐fogging capacities). Finally, the future opportunities and challenges of applying self‐healing materials in food packaging are described.

Advanced biopolymer‐based edible coating technologies for food preservation and packaging

“…It has been reported that applying the self-healing coating to the surface of lemon fruit can reduce weight loss, respiration rate, and decay percentage, keep vitamin C content, and extend shelf life up to 60 days using a threelayer treatment (Sultan et al, 2022). The mechanism of the self-healing process starts when the water adheres to the damaged surface resulting in the hydrogen bonds that initiate the electrostatic interaction between NH 3 + and COO − (Huang & Wang, 2022). Furthermore, the ability of carbon nitride-based coating film to perform a self-healing process has been demonstrated in strawberries, where the food product properties can be preserved by avoiding weight loss and retaining nutrient content (Xuan et al, 2019).…”

“…It has been reported that applying the self‐healing coating to the surface of lemon fruit can reduce weight loss, respiration rate, and decay percentage, keep vitamin C content, and extend shelf life up to 60 days using a three‐layer treatment (Sultan et al., 2022). The mechanism of the self‐healing process starts when the water adheres to the damaged surface resulting in the hydrogen bonds that initiate the electrostatic interaction between NH 3 + and COO − (Huang & Wang, 2022).…”