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Review
. 2022 Feb 26;11(5):697.
doi: 10.3390/foods11050697.

Cereal and Confectionary Packaging: Background, Application and Shelf-Life Extension

Anna-Sophia Bauer  1 , Kärt Leppik  2   3 , Kata Galić  4 , Ioannis Anestopoulos  5   6 , Mihalis I Panayiotidis  5   6 , Sofia Agriopoulou  7 , Maria Milousi  8 , Ilke Uysal-Unalan  9   10 , Theodoros Varzakas  7 , Victoria Krauter  1
Affiliations
Review

Cereal and Confectionary Packaging: Background, Application and Shelf-Life Extension

Anna-Sophia Bauer et al. Foods. .

Abstract

In both public and private sectors, one can notice a strong interest in the topic of sustainable food and packaging. For a long time, the spotlight for optimization was placed on well-known examples of high environmental impacts, whether regarding indirect resource use (e.g., meat, dairy) or problems in waste management. Staple and hedonistic foods such as cereals and confectionary have gained less attention. However, these products and their packaging solutions are likewise of worldwide ecologic and economic relevance, accounting for high resource input, production amounts, as well as food losses and waste. This review provides a profound elaboration of the status quo in cereal and confectionary packaging, essential for practitioners to improve sustainability in the sector. Here, we present packaging functions and properties along with related product characteristics and decay mechanisms in the subcategories of cereals and cereal products, confectionary and bakery wares alongside ready-to-eat savories and snacks. Moreover, we offer an overview to formerly and recently used packaging concepts as well as established and modern shelf-life extending technologies, expanding upon our knowledge to thoroughly understand the packaging's purpose; we conclude that a comparison of the environmental burden share between product and packaging is necessary to properly derive the need for action(s), such as packaging redesign.

Keywords: active and intelligent packaging; bakery; cereals; confectionary; food packaging; food quality; modified atmosphere packaging; shelf-life; sustainable packaging; vacuum packaging.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Outline of discussed topics, based on the review’s aims.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic packaging levels of fine bakery ware (example: chocolate chip cookie), adapted from [12,13,31].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Representation of the followed product categorization. Adapted from [59].
Figure 4
Figure 4
Selected examples of modified atmosphere, vacuum, as well as active and intelligent packaging approaches with certain use cases for cereal and confectionary packaging. Adapted from [13,108,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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