Antimicrobial food packagings

Abstract

The increasing consumer demand for safety, healthy, minimally processed food and for its longer shelf-life forces the food industry to introduce, among other things, active packagings including antimicrobial food packagings. The major components of such packagings comprise: benzoic acid, sorbic acid, their salts, nisin, lysozyme, essential oils, and others. Those components, adequately incorporated into the matrices of packagings, protect against or reduce the development of many micro-organisms, such as: Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella typhimurium, Staphylococcus aureus, or moulds: Penicillium and Aspergillus niger. The effectiveness of antimicrobial packagings depend on what antimicrobial components are selected for the packaging matrix, as well as on the kind of food product to be packed. Those issues constitute the subject of this paper.