Along food supply chains, several critical steps can lead to inconsumable food. Especially food of animal origin undergoes rapid aging, when stored inadequately. Quality assessment of packaged food products faces serious problems ranging from the loss of integrity of the package to damage of the food and it is applied only to a low number of samples per batch. As a result, food products are either wasted or not analyzed, which results in a significant decrease in food safety. As a part of an intelligent packaging system, we designed a sensor foil that can detect amines, produced during the food aging process. Change of the fluorescence of the sensor foil can be assessed with spectroscopy or color change from green to red can be detected optically with a camera, e.g. by smartphone. The foil can be incorporated inside the single packaging units and noninvasively measured routinely by the store or consumer. The readout of the foils was performed with steady-state tabletop spectrometers, which were then compared to the results for readouts with different inexpensive handheld devices that could be used during real-life applications, e.g., at any step in a food supply chain. Ideally, the single food product is linked to a single foil at the primary producer, measuring the first spectrum and connecting the data to the specific product, e.g. via distributed ledger. For a transparent process chain, QR-codes could be utilized to allow access to the freshness data along the shelf life of a single package.
Food waste during all stages of the supply chain and at the consumer is an emerging problem. Non-destructive methods to determine the freshness of packaged food products could play an important role in the reduction of this problem. In this study, we developed a chemical sensor, i.e. a sensor foil, capable of detecting amines as food spoilage indicators in reaction vessels and model packaging units by fluorescence spectroscopy. To obtain the foil, a phosphorylated porphyrin was adsorbed to silica and then extruded in polyethylene. The reactivity of the foil was tested with single amines in reaction vessels to demonstrate the behavior under ideal conditions. The sensor foil was applied in model packages containing salmon or cheese to show that fluorescence spectroscopy can be used to detect the emission of spoilage indicators. Lastly, model experiments with cod filets were carried out to obtain data to test the capability of determining the freshness by machine learning algorithms.
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