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Smart food packaging commercialization

Nature Reviews Bioengineering (2024)Cite this article

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Smart food packaging technologies can actualize real-time, in situ food quality monitoring, increasing food safety and decreasing food waste. Here, we detail challenges that hinder the commercialization of such smart packaging systems and identify opportunities to facilitate their translation from prototype to product.

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Fig. 1: Advances in real-time, in situ smart food monitoring developed by the Sentinel Wraps Group.

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Acknowledgements

S.K. is a recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. The Sentinel Wraps Group has been supported by NSERC Discovery Grant and Toyota Tsusho Canada Incorporated grants awarded to T.F.D. Additionally, T.F.D. is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Nanobiomaterials.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Shadman Khan & Tohid F. Didar

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Zeinab Hosseinidoust & Carlos D. M. Filipe

  3. Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Yingfu Li

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Tohid F. Didar

Authors
  1. Shadman Khan
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  2. Zeinab Hosseinidoust
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  3. Yingfu Li
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  4. Carlos D. M. Filipe
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  5. Tohid F. Didar
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Contributions

T.F.D. has founded and led the Sentinel Wraps consortium. S.K. prepared the initial manuscript and subsequent revisions. Z.H. offered guidance and revised the text. C.D.M.F., Y.L. and T.F.D. supervised this work throughout its generation.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yingfu Li, Carlos D. M. Filipe or Tohid F. Didar.

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Competing interests

T.F.D. founded the Sentinel Wraps Group with support from core faculty members Y.L. and C.D.M.F., a consortium that seeks to actualize in-package food monitoring. We have developed several patented smart food technologies that are positioned for rapid real-world translation. Translational efforts are supported by Toyota Tsusho Canada Incorporated (TTCI), who have a global network of partners seeking to employ our systems. Key industry partners continue to support commercial scale-up assessments and initiatives.

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Khan, S., Hosseinidoust, Z., Li, Y. et al. Smart food packaging commercialization. Nat Rev Bioeng (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-024-00190-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-024-00190-5

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