Comprehensive Review on Integration of Self-Healing Polymers with Smart Food Traceability: Scope, Application and Challenges

Abstract

Food traceability has been a key component in ensuring food safety, quality, and supply chain transparency. The growing global population and increased food demand highlight challenges in ensuring safe food. The invention of smart food traceabilty systems (such as RFID, NFC) has been significant milestone in food industry. However, the development of an effective food traceability system is affected by various challenges such as the possibility of susceptible damage or scratches that may occur in food supply chain. The integration of self-healing technologies with smart food traceability systems represents a promising advancement in food technology. This comprehensive review explores various self-healing mechanisms (mostly covalent interactions such as, hydrogen bond, imine bond ) utilized in food processing and even discusses developement of self-healing based biopolymers for food applications. This paper also focuses on the research on the development of photo-cross-linkable polymeric film, starch film printing, techniques on electronic tracking using data matrix codes and wireless based detection systms. But, limited studies have been conducted with the use of embedded symbology techniques for food traceability, thereby providing a good scope for future research in this field. This comprehensive review of current technologies offers valuable insights for researchers, manufacturers, marketers, and consumers to develop customized smart food traceability systems that incorporate self-healing functionalities for a wide range of applications.