Ensure Food Hygiene And Quality With These Packaging Techniques

The recent lifestyle changes of the consumers give them less time to get ready, thus leaving them to depend on instant food. This poses a substantial challenge for the food industries to deliver good food yielding to the consumers' health. Check out a few food packaging innovations to position in your food packaging industry.

FREMONT, CA: Good packaging plays a crucial role in delivering good quality, safe, and hygienic food to consumers. Good quality food packaging constitutes the brand's renown and encourages hygiene among the consumers. We have advanced food packaging results from the consumer's wish to have good quality, tasty, ready to eat, hygienic food and extended shelf life.

Following are the types of modern packaging systems:

1. Active Packaging

This type of packaging satisfies the consumer's demand for recyclable, natural, and bio-degradable packaging materials. The cooperation of packaging material, food products, and the ambiance produce the intrinsic conditions of the package to change. Besides, this condition ensures security, wholesomeness, and aesthetic values, which extends the food's shelf life and evades contamination.

The gas absorbents and emitters command the atmospheric packaging balance. The active substance is included in a very controlled way in the food, which prevents unnecessary flavor and provides a longer shelf life. The synthetic additives are chosen carefully, considering the product characteristics and packaging material, and should form homogeneous distribution inside. The natural additives include bioactive phenol compounds used in the active packaging of meat.

Oxygen scavengers absorb the atmospheric oxygen that permeates the packaging material during the storage. Alternately, the response counts on the oxidation of iron compounds. Usually, oxygen-absorbing agents through iron compounds are stored in sachets permeable to oxygen. Furthermore, moisture scavengers existing in the form of an absorbent tray, sachet, and absorbent pads control extra moisture and humidity present inside the package. Carbon dioxide avoids the collapsing of the package because of the existence of oxygen absorbers and helps decrease the respiration of fresh goods. Antimicrobial packaging is done through compounds with natural antimicrobial activity, such as bacteriocins and enzymes.

2. Intelligent Packaging

Intelligent packaging has appeared from the advancements in time and facilities, like temperature regulators, biosensors, ripeness monitors, and radio frequency indicators. Hence, this packaging provides signals for perceiving and evaluating the freshness of food products by sensing, recording, detecting, and communicating for decision-making, expanding storage time, and enhancing quality and safety.

This kind of packaging system also supports evaluating the efficacy of the packaging process. It requires indicators that are utilized for quality control of packaged food. The two needles, i.e., the internal attachment inside the package and the external outside the package, are attached to the lid or the headspace.

a) Time Temperature Indicator: This device provides clues about the product's time-temperature alter.

b) Freshness Indicator: This device signifies two types of changes—Microbial changes and lipid and pigments oxidation. It informs the quality of the food product.

c) Pathogen Indicators: This device checks pathogenic bacteria's presence by detecting immobilized antibodies.

3. Nanotechnology

This system employs materials or devices with 1-100 nm in length. Nanomaterials are materials with an external dimension on the nanoscale, with nanofibres, nanoplates, and nanoparticles as three clusters. Nanotechnology is widely used in packaging, biomedical, cosmetics, electronics, etc. Nanoparticle-based sensors, nanocantilevers, array biosensors, nano-test strips, electronic noses, and nanoparticles in the solution are nanosensors used in food packaging plants.

Various nanomaterials have been introduced as functional additives to food packages like titanium nitride nanoparticles, nano titanium dioxide, nano clay, and nano-zinc oxide. These nanosensors are vital for tracing the conditions of products and containers as they can find gases in the food against food spoilage and package color change.

The film packed with silicate nanoparticles bestows food freshness by lessening the flow of oxygen into the package and avoiding moisture leakage. This packaging also detects microbial pathogens, pesticides, toxins, and other food spoiling agents.

4. Bioactive Packaging Technology

It is a new packaging technology using various methods to retain the properties of biopolymers, including nanoencapsulation, enzyme encapsulation, enzyme immobilization, and microencapsulation. This supports altering the package and coating to affect consumers' health positively. Method of bioactive packaging technology is applied through

a) Employment of bioactive packaging materials for releasing bioactive or functional components.

b) Epitome of bioactive components into the food or packaging materials.

c) Introduction of packaging materials comprising enzyme activity and capable of transforming food components for delivering health benefits.

These food packaging technologies are meeting to make up packaging techniques by creating new possibilities for the food industries to utilize these technologies in the future. These inventions are expected to secure food safety, quality, and stability and fulfill the ever-growing requirements of consumers.