Antimicrobial Packaging: Enhancing Food Safety and Shelf-Life

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INTRODUCTION
Packaging of foods is one of the final steps in food processing before storage and consumption and thus is a critical step for incorporating antimicrobial mechanisms particularly to control the post-processing contamination. Antimicrobial packaging is a promising form of active packaging to improve safety and shelf-life of food products. It is a novel development system which incorporates antimicrobial agent into a polymer film to suppress the activities of targeted microorganisms that are contaminating foods [14]. The antimicrobial activity can be accomplished by adding antimicrobial agents in the packaging system to prevent the growth of microbes by extending the lag period and decreasing live counts of microorganisms by reducing …show more content…

Active packaging can be defined as a system that modifies the environment inside the food package thereby altering the state of the packaged food system and its headspace to enhance its quality by extending shelf-life, enhancing the sensory qualities, and maintaining the microbial safety [8, 16] Some of the active packaging systems include O2 or CO2 scavengers, ethylene and moisture absorption systems, CO2 or ethanol emitting systems, and antimicrobials antioxidants releasing or containing systems [9]. Materials like ascorbic acid, photo-sensitive dyes, iron powder, are packed to scavenge oxygen and thereby to prevent the growth of aerobic bacteria and moulds …show more content…

Controlled release application in case of bacteriocins offers a treatment strategy for resistant bacterial strain [3]. Research has elucidated that the instantaneous release of nisin can help inhibit microbial cell growth and consequently the survivors will undergo mutations developing resistance to nisin. Additionally merely releasing nisin from packaging without adding directly to the formulations was not capable of reducing microbial cell counts. A combination of these two resulted both in reduced cell counts as well as a lack of mutation however rather the cells regained their sensitivity to nisin following one transfer passage through nisin-free medium

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