Biodegradable Food Packaging Materials and Prospects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for Tomato Fruit and Product Handling

The environment and food safety are major areas of concern influencing the development of biodegradable packaging for partial replacement of petrochemical-based polymers. This review is aimed at updating the recent advances in biodegradable packaging material and the role of virtual technology and nanotechnology in the tomato supply chain. Some of the common biodegradable materials are gelatin, starch, chitosan, cellulose, and polylactic acid. The tensile strength, tear resistance, permeability, degradability, and solubility are some of the properties defining the selection and utilization of food packaging materials. Biodegradable films can be degraded in soil by microbial enzymatic actions and bioassimilation. Nanoparticles are incorporated into blended films to improve the performance of packaging materials. The prospects of the fourth industrial revolution can be realized with the use of virtual platforms such as sensor systems in authentification and traceability of food and packaging products. There is a research gap on the development of a hybrid sensor system unit that can integrate sampling headspace (SHS), detection unit, and data processing of big data for heterogeneous tomato-derived volatiles. Principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and artificial neutral network (ANN) are some of the common mathematical models for data interpretation of sensor systems.