Informative and corrective responsive packaging: Advances in farm-to-fork monitoring and remediation of food quality and safety

Authors: ZHANG, XINHUI - Zhejiang University; GUO, MINGMING - Zhejiang University; ISMAIL, BALARABE - Zhejian University; HE, QIAO - Zhejiang University; Jin, Zhonglin; LIU, DONGHONG - Zhejiang University

Submitted to: Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/17/2021
Publication Date: 7/28/2021
Citation: Zhang, X., Guo, M., Ismail, B.B., He, Q., Jin, Z.T., Ye, X., Liu, D. 2021. Informative and corrective responsive packaging: Advances in farm-to-fork monitoring and remediation of food quality and safety. Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety. https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4337.12807.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4337.12807

Interpretive Summary: Central kitchens have grown rapidly all over the world due to the cost effective for the industry and convenience for consumers. However, this industry faces the challenges how to ensure the food safety while still keep the food freshness before consumption. This review article is to summarize the principles and current research of active, intelligent, and responsive packaging materials for ensuring the quality and safety of packaged food, especially those processed from central kitchen. In addition, this review discusses several future trends and challenges of food packaging to provide some valuable references for the research of food packaging technology.

Technical Abstract: Central kitchen was developed rapidly for producing and distributing ready-to-eat and semi-cooked foods. Ensuring food safety and quality for products from a central kitchen to consumers is critical for this industry. Food packaging provides physical protection for a food product against external environments during transportation and storage. Due to the growing interest of consumers for fresh products with extended shelf life and guaranteed quality, several emerging packaging technologies were researched to supply higher quality, fresh-like, safe, and convenient food products. Active packaging can maintain the quality and safety of packaged food through the action of active compounds. It includes active scavenging and releasing system based on the mechanism of action. Intelligent packaging can monitor the conditions of packaged food and the surrounding environment, then warn about the possible food quality and safety issues through various signals of indicators, sensors, or data carriers. Furthermore, responsive packaging is an emerging packaging technology which can trigger the release of active agents by different stimuli in the surrounding environment of packaged food and enable real time remediation of food quality. This review aims at giving an overview of the definition, characteristics, and potential applications in central kitchen products of different types of food packaging technologies, with an emphasis on the mechanisms and superiority of responsive packaging. Finally, the challenges and future prospects were discussed to help promote commercial application of all the packaging technologies.