Consumers can rarely assess the freshness of a food product with the naked eye. Yet easily perishable foods such as raw meat and fish products are highly susceptible to microbial decomposition processes.
Intelligent food packaging, capable of detecting the microbial state of its contents, would not only increase product safety, it would also reduce food waste at the end of the supply chain. Such sensor packaging would reliably determine whether a product is still edible, no matter whether the best-before date had already expired or not.