New perspectives in active and intelligent food packaging

Packaging is an intermediary product between producers and consumers. The most important role of packaging is to ensure the highest quality and safety of packaged products and to extend their shelf life. Given that microbiological contamination is a problem for manufacturers and consumers due to the fact that it reduces the quality of packaged products and poses a health risk, this work describes solutions related to antimicrobial packaging. More attention is given to antioxidant packaging that releases synthetic or natural antioxidants to prevent food oxidation. The purpose of intelligent packaging is to monitor the quality of food products, as well as inform consumers and food producers of their quality. Therefore, many studies focus on developing time temperature indicators. The work also discusses radio frequency identification (RFID), whose application has a lot of advantages, such as identifiability, management of stored products, labor cost savings and ensuring the quality and safety of packaged products. Practical applications The current trends related to food safety and the growing expectations of the consumers lead to changes in the approach to food packing. Active and intelligent packaging has been present on the global packaging market for years, and scientists all over the world are looking for novelties related to this kind of packaging. For these reasons, this work focuses on presenting new solutions in active and intelligent packaging.