Designing advanced food packaging systems and technologies through modeling and virtualization

Finding an appropriate food package solution is a challenging task today, due to the necessity of integrating an increasing number of cross-linked and sometimes contradictory requirements related to the specific multiple purposes that a packaging system is supposed to provide. The complexity and variety of food products, stricter food quality requirements, rapidly changing consumer demand paradigms, increasing demands for sustainability, and the fast adaptations of multimodal food distribution networks to the modern way of living of our liquid society make food packaging development a difficult task in today’s world. This chapter provides a taxonomy of existing research, design, and engineering approaches and technologies for food packaging and provides some examples of their application in practice. Such techniques provide wide support to designers and even food supply chain planners committed to proposing cost-effective, ergonomic logistics and environmentally friendly food packages.