Toward future-ready food packaging: From passive protection to intelligent, self-healing, and data-enabled systems

Background Food packaging is essential for protecting food quality and safety during storage and distribution. However, conventional passive systems are increasingly unable to meet the growing demands for freshness indication, sustainability, and supply-chain responsiveness. Consequently, packaging is evolving from a static barrier to a functional interface capable of sensing, maintaining performance, and supporting adaptive decision-making. Scope and approach This review examined the evolution of food packaging from conventional barrier systems to intelligent, self-healing, and data-enabled platforms. It discusses responsive material platforms, indicator and sensor technologies, digital traceability tools, self-healing mechanisms, and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in freshness evaluation, shelf-life prediction, and adaptive quality management. Key findings and conclusions Intelligent packaging translates changes in pH, gases, volatile metabolites, temperature history, humidity, and microbial activity into readable optical, electrical, and digital signals. Self-healing materials extend this functionality by restoring the barrier integrity, mechanical continuity, active-release behavior, and signal reliability after damage. Artificial intelligence further enables the interpretation of multimodal packaging outputs for risk classification, shelf-life estimation, and decision support. However, broader translation is still limited by signal drift, insufficient food contact safety validation, weak long-term reliability, structural–functional tradeoffs, high fabrication costs, and poor integration among sensing, repair, and data interpretation. Future progress should prioritize calibrated signals, function-oriented healing assessments, scalable manufacturing, regulatory readiness, and closed-loop architectures that connect recognition, judgment, actuation, and feedback. Overall, future-ready food packaging should be understood not as a single material innovation but as a system-level interface linking food state, package performance, data reliability, and supply-chain action.