Oxygen Sensors for Food Packaging

Consumer demand for high quality foods and environmental concerns about food waste production has driven the demand for innovative food packaging systems to guarantee food safety, quality, traceability and food waste reduction. Factors such as O2 concentration, loss of packaging containment, seal integrity, inadequate gas mixes used in modified atmosphere packaging, etc. not only compromise the safety and quality but also significantly reduce the shelf life of packaged foods. Monitoring and control of these factors prior to, during and post-processing would greatly improve the safety and quality of foods and food production systems, thereby providing greater consumer protection. Intelligent packaging integrated with O2 sensors has developed remarkably in recent years and proven its capability to monitor/measure O2 content throughout the food supply chain of a wide variety of packaged foods and beverages. While the current crop of sensor technologies has demonstrated time and time again their ability to successfully troubleshoot technical issues which have been associated, in particular, with quality, safety and shelf life issues associated with foods and beverages at a scientific level, their actual take up as daily used technologies at an industrial level has lagged far behind. While this has been the case to date, greater demands for enhanced product safety and continued demands for extended product shelf lives while moving products over ever longer distribution chains, now presents the ideal industrial conditions for sensor-led technologies to be adopted and applied industrially. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of different O2 sensor materials and measurement instrumentation used to destructively/non-destructively monitor/measure O2 in packaged foods and beverages.