Engineering Catalytic Nanozymes for Antimicrobial Food Systems: Structure–Activity Relationships, Safe-by-Design Principles, and Industrial Translation

Catalytic nanozymes have emerged as a versatile class of engineered nanomaterials that combine enzyme-like catalytic activity with exceptional physicochemical stability, tunable composition, and scalable fabrication, offering significant advantages over natural enzymes for antimicrobial applications in food systems. Recent advances in materials engineering have enabled the development of nanozymes with enhanced catalytic efficiency, broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity, and improved resistance to harsh food-processing environments. Nevertheless, current research remains fragmented across diverse material platforms and application scenarios, while a comprehensive understanding of how engineering strategies govern catalytic performance, antimicrobial efficacy, and translational potential is still lacking. This review provides a critical and systematic analysis of catalytic nanozymes for antimicrobial food systems from a structure-activity relationship perspective. Emphasis is placed on the engineering principles that regulate enzyme-mimicking activities, including compositional tuning, crystal phase and facet engineering, defect creation, heterostructure construction, pore architecture, surface functionalization, and single-atom engineering. The relationships between these structural features and catalytic mechanisms, including peroxidase-, oxidase-, catalase-, and multi-enzyme-like activities, are discussed in relation to the generation of reactive oxygen species, membrane disruption, extracellular polymeric substance degradation, biofilm eradication, and pathogen inactivation. Representative applications in food-contact surface decontamination, antimicrobial packaging, fresh produce preservation, and intelligent food processing are critically evaluated using recent experimental evidence. Beyond antimicrobial performance, this review introduces a safe-by-design framework that integrates material engineering with toxicological assessment, nanoparticle migration, environmental fate, regulatory considerations, and scalable manufacturing. Emerging opportunities for artificial intelligence-assisted nanozyme design, high-throughput materials discovery, and data-driven optimization are also discussed as transformative approaches for accelerating industrial translation. By integrating materials science, catalytic mechanisms, food microbiology, and safety assessment, this review establishes a comprehensive framework for the rational development of next-generation catalytic nanozymes toward sustainable, effective, and industrially applicable antimicrobial food systems.