Smart Food Packaging: An Umbrella Review of Scientific Publications

The pivotal roles of smart packaging in the food industry are ensuring food quality and safety as well as providing consumers with important information about the food, allowing them to make more informed purchase/consumption decisions. The purpose of this study is to provide a holistic bibliometric analysis of smart food packaging. Bibliometric analysis collected 878 documents from the Scopus database. The annual trend revealed a three-phase growth, i.e., initial (1986–1999), development (2000–2016), and exponential (2017–2022). Since 2017, smart food packaging has attracted increasing research interest. From the keywords analysis, similar general topics of research were identified before and after the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19). Remarkably, COVID-19 accelerated research and development toward finding sustainable and safe bio-based materials. However, most smart packaging materials are still not commercialized mainly due to the high cost of production and the absence of international standard regulations. Overall, academia is steps ahead in commercialization, where novel materials and mechanisms are tested for their efficiency and safety. The widespread of smart packaging relies on finding sustainable and safe solutions that are feasible at large scale and accepted by consumers.