CHAPTER 17: Applications of Phosphorescent O₂ Sensors in Food and Beverage Packaging Systems Check Access

Consumer demand for high quality food products has driven the packaging industry to look for new solutions to enhance food safety. In packaged food products, seal integrity is essential to the physical, chemical and biological quality of the packaged product as seal integrity failure will not only compromise product safety and containment, but also significantly reduce shelf-life. Intelligent packaging integrated with O₂ sensors are capable of monitoring packaging process efficiency, integrity and improving food safety by facilitating enhanced surveillance of packaged food products throughout the food supply chain, whilst being contactless and non-destructive, economical, fast, reliable and versatile over a wide range of environmental and processing conditions. Numerous commercial technologies now exist to both control O₂ within product packages and monitor O₂ levels within food and beverage packs. Although there are many O₂ sensing dyes and materials reported in the scientific literature, only a limited number have been used in food packaging applications. This chapter will summarise the applications of different phosphorescent O₂ sensors used to non-destructively monitor O₂ in packaged food and beverage products.