Development of a microbial Time Temperature Indicator for monitoring the shelf life of meat

Irreversible colorimetric bio-based curcumin bilayer membranes for smart food packaging temperature control applications

Research into innovative food safety technologies has led to the development of smart packaging with embedded chemical sensors that can monitor food quality throughout the supply chain. Thermochromic materials (TM), which are able to dynamically change colour in response to temperature fluctuations, have proven to be reliable indicators of food quality in certain environments. Natural colourants such as curcumin are becoming increasingly popular for smart packaging due to their low toxicity, environmental friendliness and ability to change colour. The innovation in this research lies in the production of a bio-based bilayer membrane specifically designed for irreversible temperature monitoring. Membrane A was prepared by dissolving cellulose acetate and curcumin in acetone at room temperature, with glycerol serving as a plasticiser. At the same time, membrane B was carefully formulated by dissolving cellulose acetate and triethanolamine in acetone, with sorbitol as plasticiser. The preparation of these different membranes revealed a remarkable event: a gradual and irreversible colour transition from an initial yellow to a brick-red hue after 24 hours of storage at 25 °C. The chemical structure and morphological analyses of the membranes were performed using several techniques, including FTIR, DSC and SEM. The membrane labels were adhered to aluminium cans and their colorimetric response was observed over a period of 10 days. Minimal colour variations were observed, confirming the reproducibility and stability of the curcumin-based membranes as temperature sensors.

A review on the relation between grinding process and quality of ground meat

This review is providing an overview of the actual and past research in the field of ground meat. The forces that are acting in the meat grinder are well understood. The higher the forces that are acting on the meat while grinding, the stronger the disintegration of the meat cells after the process. These forces can be calculated as energy transfer in meat grinders using specific mechanical energy (SME). The amount of non-intact cells (ANIC) can be used to describe the extent of disintegrated cells. Different methods are available to rate the quality of ground meat, which is mainly influenced by the raw material and processing. Over the past decades of industrialization, the landscape of ground meat production has changed. However, the effects of the process adjustments on the quality of ground meat are not yet sufficiently described in the literature.

Recent Advance of Intelligent Packaging Aided by Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Food Freshness

Food safety is a pressing concern for human society, as it directly impacts people's lives, while food freshness serves as one of the most crucial indicators in ensuring food safety. There exist diverse techniques for monitoring food freshness, among which intelligent packaging based on artificial intelligence technology boasts the advantages of low cost, high efficiency, fast speed and wide applicability; however, it is currently underutilized. By analyzing the current research status of intelligent packaging both domestically and internationally, this paper provides a clear classification of intelligent packaging technology. Additionally, it outlines the advantages and disadvantages of using intelligent packaging technology for food freshness detection methods, while summarizing the latest research progress in applying artificial intelligence-based technologies to food freshness detection through intelligent packaging. Finally, the author points out the limitations of the current research, and anticipates future developments in artificial intelligence technology for assisting freshness detection in intelligent packaging. This will provide valuable insights for the future development of intelligent packaging in the field of food freshness detection.

An Edible Humidity Indicator That Responds to Changes in Humidity Mechanically

Elevated humidity levels in medical, food, and pharmaceutical products may reduce the products' shelf life, trigger bacterial growth, and even lead to complete spoilage. In this study, we report a humidity indicator that mechanically bends and rolls itself irreversibly upon exposure to high humidity conditions. The indicator is made of two food-grade polymer films with distinct ratios of a milk protein, casein, and a plasticizer, glycerol, that are physically attached to each other. Based on the thermogravimetric analysis and microstructural characterization, we hypothesize that the bending mechanism is a result of hygroscopic swelling and consequent counter diffusion of water and glycerol. Guided by this mechanism, we demonstrate that the rolling behavior, including response time and final curvature, can be tuned by the geometric dimensions of the indicator. As the proposed indicator is made of food-grade ingredients, it can be placed directly in contact with perishable products to report exposure to undesirable humidity inside the package, without the risk of contaminating the product or causing oral toxicity in case of accidental digestion, features that commercial inedible electronic and chemo-chromatic sensors cannot provide presently.

Sustainable and Bio-Based Food Packaging: A Review on Past and Current Design Innovations

Food loss and waste occur for many reasons, from crop processing to household leftovers. Even though some waste generation is unavoidable, a considerable amount is due to supply chain inefficiencies and damage during transport and handling. Packaging design and materials innovations represent real opportunities to reduce food waste within the supply chain. Besides, changes in people's lifestyles have increased the demand for high-quality, fresh, minimally processed, and ready-to-eat food products with extended shelf-life, that need to meet strict and constantly renewed food safety regulations. In this regard, accurate monitoring of food quality and spoilage is necessary to diminish both health hazards and food waste. Thus, this work provides an overview of the most recent advances in the investigation and development of food packaging materials and design with the aim to improve food chain sustainability. Enhanced barrier and surface properties as well as active materials for food conservation are reviewed. Likewise, the function, importance, current availability, and future trends of intelligent and smart packaging systems are presented, especially considering biobased sensor development by 3D printing technology. In addition, driving factors affecting fully biobased packaging design and materials development and production are discussed, considering byproducts and waste minimization and revalorization, recyclability, biodegradability, and other possible ends-of-life and their impact on product/package system sustainability.

Capsule-based colorimetric temperature monitoring system for customizable cold chain management

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting supply chain disruption have rekindled crucial needs for safe storage and transportation of essential items. Despite recent advances, existing temperature monitoring technologies for cold chain management fall short in reliability, cost, and flexibility toward customized cold chain management for various products with different required temperature. In this work, we report a novel capsule-based colorimetric temperature monitoring system with precise and readily tunable temperature ranges. Triple emulsion drop-based microfluidic technique enables rapid production of monodisperse microcapsules with an interstitial phase-change oil (PCO) layer with precise control over its dimension and composition. Liquid-solid phase transition of the PCO layer below its freezing point triggers the release of the encapsulated payload yielding drastic change in color, allowing user-friendly visual monitoring in a highly sensitive manner. Simple tuning of the PCO layer's compositions can further broaden the temperature range in a precisely controlled manner. The proposed simple scheme can readily be formulated to detect both temperature rise in the frozen environment and freeze detection as well as multiple temperature monitoring. Combined, these results support a significant step forward for the development of customizable colorimetric monitoring of a broad range of temperatures with precision.

pH-dependent color response of cellulose-based time-temperature indicators impregnated with red cabbage extract

Color-based time-temperature indicators (TTIs) can show the time and temperature changes of an environment with a visually recognizable color change. Made from natural dyes, these TTIs are simple, inexpensive and sustainable. In this study, cellulose-based TTI labels were prepared with red cabbage extract of pH2, pH7 and pH9 to determine how pH alter the response of the labels to time and temperature changes. This study also aimed to determine the relationship between color change and time at different temperatures. The color responses of the labels were followed spectrophotometrically by measuring the CIE Lab color coordinates and by giving the total color difference at 4 °C, 23 °C, 40 °C, 80 and 100 °C after increments of time. The best fitting linear or nonlinear regression models of the CIE Lab coordinates, total color difference and time data as a function of temperature were also determined. The labels prepared with red cabbage extract at different pH behaved differently. Opposite to expectations, the acidic, pink colored labels did not have the highest color stability. Our finding was, that the label prepared with the acidic red cabbage extract is the most suitable as time-temperature label for indicating long-term temperature storage and the label prepared with the neutral red cabbage extract is the most suitable as time-temperature label for indicating short-term storage by color change. According to the results the color changes of the labels are predictable with the fitted models with a correlation coefficient between 0.96 and 1.

Properties and Applications of Intelligent Packaging Indicators for Food Spoilage

Food packaging plays a vital role in the food supply chain by acting as an additional layer to protect against food contamination, but the main function of traditional conventional packaging is only to isolate food from the outside environment, and cannot provide related information about food spoilage. Intelligent packaging can feel, inspect, and record external or internal changes in food products to provide further information about food quality. Importantly, intelligent packaging indicators will account for a significant proportion of the food industry’s production, with promising application potential. In this review, we mainly summarize and review the upcoming progress in the classification, preparation, and application of food packaging indicators. Equally, the feasibility of 3D printing in the preparation of intelligent food packaging indicators is also discussed in detail, as well as the limitations and future directions of smart food packaging. Taken together, the information supported in this paper provides new insights into monitoring food spoilage and food quality.

Intelligent Dynamic Quality Prediction of Chilled Chicken with Integrated IoT Flexible Sensing and Knowledge Rules Extraction

With the enhancement of consumers’ food safety awareness, consumers have become more stringent on meat quality. This study constructs an intelligent dynamic prediction model based on knowledge rules and integrates flexible humidity sensors into the non-destructive monitoring of the Internet of Things to provide real-time feedback and dynamic adjustments for the chilled chicken cold chain. The optimized sensing equipment can be attached to the inside of the packaging to deal with various abnormal situations during the cold chain, effectively improving the packaging effect. Through correlation analysis of collected data and knowledge rule extraction of critical factors in the cold chain, the established quality evaluation and prediction model achieved detailed chilled chicken quality level classification and intelligent quality prediction. The obtained results show that the accuracy of the prediction model is higher than 90.5%, and all the regression coefficients are close to 1.00. The relevant personnel (workers and cold chain managers) were invited to participate in the performance analysis and optimization suggestion to improve the applicability of the established prediction model. The optimized model can provide a more efficient theoretical reference for timely decision-making and further e-commerce management.

Development of a PCL-PEO double network colorimetric pH sensor using electrospun fibers containing Hibiscus rosa sinensis extract and silver nanoparticles for food monitoring

Major anthocyanin, cyanidin-3-sophoroside (318.1 mg/mL), and other minor copigments were identified in the ethanol extract of Hibiscus rosa sinensis. The extracts can be coelectrospun with polycaprolactone and polyethylene oxide into fiber mats and were sensitive to pH changes from 1 to 13 with a unique color code (ΔE > 5). The pH sensor was used to monitor shrimp quality under isothermal conditions to obtain the respective activation energy (Ea in kJ/mol) of the sensors' color-change response (20.2), measured pH (20.6), and trimethylamine nitrogen (24.6), indole (27.1), and total microbial counts (30.8). Together with the Pearson correlation coefficient, the results showed high correlations between the sensors' color change and other quality parameters (p < 0.001). The regression equation developed by conducting the kinetic analysis was also suitable for predicting shrimp quality at refrigeration temperatures (4-10 °C) and can be used as a marker to monitor shrimp quality by visually inspecting the item condition.

Nanomaterials in Smart Packaging Applications: A Review

Food wastage is a critical and world-wide issue resulting from an excess of food supply, poor food storage, poor marketing, and unstable markets. Since food quality depends on consumer standards, it becomes necessary to monitor the quality to ensure it meets those standards. Embedding sensors with active nanomaterials in food packaging enables customers to monitor the quality of their food in real-time. Though there are many different sensors that can monitor food quality and safety, pH sensors and time-temperature indicators (TTIs) are the most critical metrics in indicating quality. This review showcases some of the recent progress, their importance, preconditions, and the various future needs of pH sensors and TTIs in food packaging for smart sensors in food packaging applications. In discussing these topics, this review includes the materials used to make these sensors, which vary from polymers, metals, metal-oxides, carbon-based materials; and their modes of fabrication, ranging from thin or thick film deposition methods, solution-based chemistry, and electrodeposition. By discussing the use of these materials, novel fabrication process, and problems for the two sensors, this review offers solutions to a brighter future for the use of nanomaterials for pH indicator and TTIs in food packaging applications.

Valorization of natural colors as health-promoting bioactive compounds: Phytochemical profile, extraction techniques, and pharmacological perspectives

Color is the prime attribute with a large impact on consumers' perception, selection, and acceptance of foods. However, the belief in bio-safety protocols, health benefits, and the nutritional importance of food colors had focused the attention of the scientific community across the globe towards natural colorants that serve to replace their synthetic toxic counterparts. Moreover, multi-disciplinary applications of greener extraction techniques and their hyphenated counterparts for selective extraction of bioactive compounds is a hot topic focusing on process intensification, waste valorization, and retention of highly stable bioactive pigments from natural sources. In this article, we have reviewed available literature to provide all possible information on various aspects of natural colorants, including their sources, photochemistry and associated biological activities explored under in-vitro and in-vivo animal and human studies. However a particular focus is given on innovative technological approaches for the effective extraction of natural colors for nutraceutical and pharmaceutical applications.

A critical review on intelligent and active packaging in the food industry: Research and development

The emergence of many new food products on the market with need of consumers to constantly monitor their quality until consuming, in addition to the necessity for reducing food corruption during preservation time, have led to the development of some modern packaging technologies such as intelligent packaging (IP) and active packaging (AP). The benefits of IP are detecting defects, quality monitoring and tracking the packaged food products to control the storage conditions from the production stage to the consumption stage by using various sensors and indicators such as time-temperature indicators (TTIs), gas indicators, humidity sensors, optical, calorimetric and electrochemical biosensors. While, AP helps to increase the shelf-life of products by using absorbing and diffusion systems for various materials like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ethanol. However, there are some important issues over these emerging technologies including cost, marketability, consumer acceptance, safety and organoleptic quality of the food and emphatically environmental safety concerns. Therefore, future researches should be conducted to solve these problems and to prompt applications of IP and AP in the food industry. This paper reviews the latest innovations in these advanced packaging technologies and their applications in food industry. The IP systems namely indicators, barcoding techniques, radio frequency identification systems, sensors and biosensor are reviewed and then the latest innovations in AP methods including scavengers, diffusion systems and antimicrobial packaging are reviewed in detail.