A smart packaging (SP) system ensures the quality and safety of food along the supply chain, straight from the farm to the consumer. Breakthroughs in SP are effective at preventing food loss and waste by enhancing product traceability and sustainability, every step of the way.
The SP system combines intelligent and active packaging models to diagnose product changes and respond to them accordingly. SP is an essential part of storing food in the appropriate serving size before it arrives at a grocery store.
Long Standing Problems within the Food Supply Chain
Uncertainty is a pressing issue in the food supply chain, often causing disturbances anywhere from delays in stocking inventory to an unpredictable demand for goods. Likewise, many products must be handled and stored differently.
Another problem stems from perishable products deteriorating in value over the course of their shelf life. Temperature and humidity differences have a serious impact on food quality, possibly contaminating products with harmful agents.
Moreover, regulatory pressure and conservation laws are raising the bar on food packaging and waste recycling standards. A lack of food safety controls, poor storage methods, and the absence of product labeling information contributes to loss and waste.
Food left unattended in a warehouse is prone to spoil eventually. Likewise, unlabeled containers are harder to identify and sort into bulk quantities, rendering them unsafe for consumption.
Roughly 1.3 billion tons of food products are lost each year, posing a risk to human health and draining resources from the environment. Consumers are simply unaware of the amount of leftovers they throw out. This leads to inflated food prices, depressed wages, and more pollution in the air.
How Does a Smart Packaging System work?
A smart packaging system is used to preserve packaged foods in the best condition. What it does is minimize food loss along the manufacturing pipeline and extend a product’s shelf-life to ensure it stays fresh and reflects what’s printed on the label.
During production, SP keeps track of packaged foods on the assembly line to check their conditions between storage and transport. It relies on chemical analysis to identify various metrics such as temperature and ripeness; it then transfers this data to a carrier system.
SP and active packaging are important tools for meeting food safety requirements. Coupled with location indicators, those machines can readily map out transport routes in real-time, enabling drivers to find the fastest route to a distribution center. All things considered, these strategies play a significant role throughout the supply chain.
An SP system will improve supply chain distribution in the long run. Whereas several cutting-edge technologies were proposed to combat the limitations of energy consumption and infrastructure, only a few of them could address multiple issues at once.
These challenges can be attributed to poor equipment maintenance, extensive regulations by the FDA, and a lack of collaboration among retailers, which all contribute to food wastage. It would take combining multiple chemical processes in order to prevent food waste from accumulating.
One attempt involved extracting energy from food waste through processes like ethanol fermentation, anaerobic digestion, or gasification. Another technique consisted of weighing the amount of food wasted on a smart scale. The goal here is to treat organic waste with chemicals until it can be discarded with minimal impact on the environment.
SP Systems Upholds the Integrity of Perishable Goods
More than ever, food manufacturers are striving to provide consumers with organic and eco-friendly options. And they can achieve that by introducing SP indicators into their packaging process to determine a product’s overall integrity.
SP systems are capable of tracing chemicals associated with food spoilage. These systems target biological markers to detect infectious pathogens and decide whether food is safe for consumption. One method is to use smart-sensor RFID tags to recognize changes in food properties from pH to viscosity.
To monitor the temperature of packaged foods, a time-temperature integrator can change the color of containers and labels in response to volatile compounds with its built-in chemo sensors. In food storage, it detects significant temperature changes while food is still in storage but before it is packaged and shipped out.
Food companies may need to invest in smart instruments to lower the cost of production, not to mention reduce time spent on managing their stocked inventories. Fortunately, they have access to advanced machinery, capable of identifying equipment malfunctions and notifying operators of which areas to troubleshoot.
SP Labeling Enhances Mass Production of Printable Electronics
Product labels help consumers make informed choices about what they eat and how to prepare it. An organic or fat-free label drives consumers to buy healthier foods, more so than just listing the nutritional facts. As of late, common label printing methods include: gravure, flexography, inkjet, and aerosol, with varying degrees of precision and cost-efficiency.
Since large amounts of food are stocked at grocery stores, retail suppliers must produce food labels at a high volume, and one way to do that is to implement SP into label printing. As such, printable electronics are becoming crucial for designing scalable packaging labels.
The ideal food labels are sensitive to physical and chemical changes brought upon by defrosting, humidity, and exposure to light. The benefits to consumers are evident, as they get alerted to the conditions of unopened food packages.
On the whole, SP sensors and indicators should include smart elements that are low-cost, precise, and reproducible. This new method could potentially overcome many challenges of label printing via optimizing the printing parameters without consuming too much electricity.
Given that printing is selected in the earlier stages, it’s bound to have a huge impact on the production, storage, and transport costs.
Conclusion
An SP system is arguably the most efficient way to run a food supply chain because it encourages the full collaboration of suppliers and manufacturers to work towards the same goals, through staying compliant with food quality and safety standards.
To a large extent, safety, sustainability, and integrity have the highest priority in the food supply chain and investing in SP technologies is a surefire strategy to improve the traditional system beyond typical tracking and compliance indicators.
Nowadays, smart packaging technology can interact with users, absorb unwanted substances, and even project 3D models of the product. There is no doubt that smart packaging has transformed many areas of the food supply chain, and it would be a shame to miss out on this distribution trend.
