Nanomaterials for active and intelligent food packaging: Shelf-life extension, real-time sensing, and security applications.

Nanotechnology offers innovative strategies for developing advanced active and intelligent food packaging systems to address these multifaceted issues. This review explores the critical role of nanomaterials (NMs) in food packaging innovation, focusing on real-time sensing, mechanical interactions and security applications. This review provides mechanistic insights into nanomaterial-analyte interactions, including surface chemistry, charge transfer phenomena, plasmonic effects and signal transduction pathways. Applications in food security and anti-counterfeiting are also discussed, with particular emphasis on luminescent tags, nanophotonic inks, and blockchain-integrated nanosensors. We critically assess sustainability aspects-such as environmental impact, portability, toxicity, and biodegradability-alongside regulatory considerations, and examine challenges related to material design, data integration, consumer acceptance and the use of AI and machine learning for predictive quality monitoring. The report concludes by proposing future directions toward a fully sustainable, intelligent, and safe food system that harnesses nanotechnology to improve food safety, reduce waste, and ensure supply chain transparency.