How Smart Packaging is Helping the Food Industry

Smart packaging technologies offer a lot of commercial promise, along with making packaging more customized and communicative.

FREMONT, CA: Urgent need for increased food production is crucial in humankind's future. A key aspect concerns food preservation, wherein packaging is the main aspect. Improvement of packaging means less cost, more food available, and waste decrease. Several solutions are emerging to face this challenge.

The arena of smart packaging is rapidly moving and increasing in researches. Packaging that incorporates diagnostic indicators such as monitoring vibration, acidity, tilt, shock, humidity, light, heat, time chemicals, viruses, or bacteria as they develop or as they are contacted. So proper monitoring of these factors can lead to giving definitive information about the quality or safety of a product. Intelligent packaging offers an additional benefit that goes beyond the mere packaging task. The intelligence of packaging essentially results from communication with the outside world.

[vendor_logo_first]Additionally, intelligent packaging also fulfills information, automation, marketing, or protective functions,  through barcodes, LEDs, augmented reality, NFC, loudspeakers, radio chips, or displays. Extended packaging offers additional product information on the origin, production conditions, or ingredients. By scanning barcodes or RFID chips, the data can be called up in conjunction with a suitable application.

Packaging equipped with augmented reality elements goes one step further by offering visualizations that virtually supplement real images. The application possibilities are virtual tours, competitions, virtual theme worlds, or operating instructions that appear on the packaging when filming a product has already been realized.

Smart packaging is still at the beginning, but its potential is immense. Although the technology for smart packaging is available in many areas, its mass application is so far less popular due to the high production costs.

See also: Top Food and Beverages Technology Solution Companies