Smartphone-based label on package for monitoring the freshness of meat: a review

Recently, meat waste and illnesses related to meat spoilage have increased significantly, and ensuring meat freshness has become more crucial for consumers and the food industry. To address this issue, developing sensitive, simple, non-destructive, cost-effective, and real-time methods for assessing freshness during storage, transportation, and sale is vital. Different strategies for smart packaging have been innovated with the help of technology to create smart labels and sensors. Most of these freshness indicators are made based on color changes of the labels due to meat spoilage. Fluorescent dyes and natural dyes combined with biopolymers such as gelatin and chitosan are the main materials to use as colorimetric/ pH-sensitive indicators in smart packaging devices. Smartphone applications improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the labels by monitoring color variations to assess meat freshness levels through algorithms and datasets, hence reducing errors from manual observation. Consumers and laborers can simply scan smart labels to recognize meat freshness. In this study, different smartphone-based label on package for monitoring the freshness of meat are reviewed. Furthermore, although there is a certain gap for smart meat packaging in the food industry, and a bright future is forecast for it; more investigation is still required to commercialize these labels, reduce the cost of them, and also to achieve consumer acceptance in the future.