From concept to shelf: engineering biopolymer-based food packaging for sustainability

Abstract

Food packaging plays a crucial role in preventing food spoilage, preserving food quality, minimising food waste, and ensuring food safety. However, the most widely used petroleum-based packaging has environmental and health concerns, which restrict its use. Thus, there is a need for more sustainable options. A viable solution can be the utilization of eco-friendly biopolymers as a substitute for traditional petroleum-based packaging. The primary objective of biopolymer-based food packaging, besides ensuring food safety and quality for consumers, is to address health as well as environmental concerns and reduce negative impacts. However, biopolymer-based materials have certain drawbacks, such as weak mechanical strength and moisture resistance. Thus, it is essential to thoroughly assess the difficulties in employing biopolymers in the food packaging sector and explore strategies to mitigate or eliminate their drawbacks. These challenges can be resolved by the incorporation of some bioactives, functionalization of biopolymers, and using nanotechnological approaches that can upgrade the performance of packaging. New food packaging materials are highly biodegradable and biocompatible, possess appropriate mechanical and thermal strength, and can monitor the real-time freshness of food products. This review provides insightful information about biopolymers that can potentially replace plastic-based packaging in an eco-friendly manner, their origin, functionality, and functionalization using different approaches (blending/composites/edible films/edible coatings/indicators/nanocomposites/nanosensors). The application of biopolymers in various food sectors for enhancing the preservation and packaging is also discussed. Moreover, the integration of SWOT and PESTEL analyses provided here highlights the eco-friendliness and biodegradability of biopolymer packaging as strengths, while their challenges include price, moisture sensitivity and mechanical stability. PESTEL analysis reveals strong political and environmental support for sustainable packaging, but economic scalability and technological roadblocks remain chief obstacles.