Recent advances in self-healing materials for food packaging

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.