Nanotechnology in Food Safety

Current Trends in Food Industry

One of the most significant aspects of food regulatory authorities and industries today are to provide safe food, which is facing unprecedented challenges around the world, where estimated toll of foodborne diseases at a frightening 600 million cases with 420,000 deaths each year.  Nonetheless, most frequent pathogens linked with these foodborne illnesses include diarrheal agents such as norovirus and Campylobactor spp, as well other bacterial pathogens such as Salmonella enterica and typhi, Listeria and Brucella.

There are several different preventative methods exist in order to minimize the risks associated with foodborne illnesses, such as freezing, heat and refrigeration storage, filtration, drying and chemical methods, as well as radiation and other thermal procedures. On the other hand, these techniques are often associated with high-energy costs, an increased possibility of degradation, as well as serious occupational and health implications with significant drawbacks that are not in compliance with the current consumer trend for greener and chemical free approaches.

Consumers are demanding better food safety – usually it was the regulators who had taken the lead when it comes to driving food safety, which is changing where consumers are more knowledgeable and engaged who are demanding higher standards following high profile incidents consumers in the past and voting with their wallets if they are not met. The reputational and business damage of food safety failures are greater than ever, where even new sentencing guidelines were introduced in 2016. Proactive businesses should therefore embrace food safety and use high standards to differentiate from the competition.

Dining trends are changing – the most of the people living in urban environments where more and more people are eating out, which is great news for the industry, but it also brings the challenges, as pressure increases on suppliers, i.e. city restaurants to serve more customers, they need more suppliers to deliver more of the fresh ingredients needed, seven days a week, year round, which brings more risks to the produce. Nonetheless, consumer preferences are constantly changing, meaning that delivering what they want is essential to building a successful business. Maintaining food safety standards while being able to keep up with demand is also vital, where companies should look at how automation in monitoring can help here.

Traceability is key to the experience – the horsemeat scandal highlighted issues around fraud in the food supply chain, and demonstrated that consumers want traceability of what they eat, who are also increasingly looking for healthy, high quality, locally sourced ingredients. Traceability demands for a greater auditing of supply chains to ensure that food can be monitored from field to fork. As we move towards 2020, food businesses that can vouch for the origins of their food will have a major competitive advantage.

The future of food safety is digital – today the kitchens in most restaurants rely on paper-based checks and records. These are inefficient, time-consuming, prone to human error and easy to falsify. Thus, technologies such as automated monitoring, digital checklists and Internet of Things-based sensors will replace paper which is available now, and allows businesses to monitor and control every aspect of routine tasks and compliance management, proving their credentials to both diners and regulators, while increasing efficiency and being ready for 2020.

What is Nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology involves the use of very small particles (nanoparticles) that have an average size, in at least one dimension, of one hundred nanometers (nm) or less. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. The chemical and physical characteristics of nanomaterials can be vary considerably from those of their larger counterparts, often turning an ordinary unreactive material into a highly reactive substance.

Even though still an emerging science, nanotechnology has been in use for production of goods such as cosmetics, where nanotechnology holds significant promise as a tool in the diagnosis and treatment of certain human illnesses. However, the interaction of nanoparticles with humans, animals and the environment has yet to be fully explored despite the numerous benefits associated with nanotechnology, since nanotechnology is viewed by the food industry as a means of enhancing food safety and nutrient bioavailability.

Nanoparticles have a considerably greater surface area to mass ratio than their larger counterparts which can alter physical and chemical properties such as reactivity and surface charge. As an example, gold at the macro scale conducts electricity, is chemically unreactive and yellow in colour, which is in contrast, gold at the nanoscale is a semiconductor, highly reactive and varies in colour from pink to red or orange, depending on how small the particles are. The small dimensions of nanoparticles also means they can reach locations in the human body not normally accessible to larger counterparts. However, the full impact of nanoparticles and their novel properties on the health of humans, animals and the environment is not fully understood at this time.

Why Nanotechnology?

As a novel technology, nanotechnology has been considered as an attractive technology that can revolutionized the food sector due to its increasing use over the past few decades. It is a technology on the nanometer scale which deals with the atoms, molecules, or the macromolecules with the size of approximately 1–100 nm to create and use materials that have novel properties. Thus, created nanomaterials possess one or more external dimensions, or an internal structure, on the scale from 1 to 100 nm that allowed the observation and manipulation of matter at the nanoscale. Hence, nanotechnologies enable the management of food ingredients on a molecular level, where nanotechnology products could have a potential of substantial impact on the food/feed manufacturing sector offering benefits for industry and the consumer.

It is observed that these materials have unique properties unlike their macroscale counterparts due to the high surface to volume ratio and other novel physiochemical properties like color, solubility, strength, diffusivity, toxicity, magnetic, optical, thermodynamic, etc., because technologies involving the control of matter on nanotechnology is in the atomic and molecular scale, normally below 100 nanometers. Under such circumstances, the nanomaterials may exhibit different physical and chemical properties compared with the same substances at normal scale, such as increased chemical reactivity due to greater surface area. Thus, nanotechnology has brought new industrial revolution in both developed and developing countries with massive investments from both private and public sectors. Therefore, nanotechnology offers a wide range of opportunities for the development and application of structures, materials, or system with new properties in various areas like agriculture, food, and medicine, etc. In fact, nanotechnology, as a rising field of interest in almost every industry, has found over 276 different applications in agricultural, food and feed markets where most common applications of nanotechnology in food safety and quality has contributed to development of nano-encapsulated agrochemicals, food additives and supplements, and antimicrobial active food packaging agents.

The rising consumer concerns about food quality, safety and health benefits are major impelling reason for researchers to rethink the ways of enhancing food quality while minimizing the degradation of nutritional value in final product. The demand of nanoparticle-based materials is increased in the food industry, since many of them contain essential elements are mostly non-toxic and stable at high temperature and pressures, where nanotechnology can offer complete food solutions from food manufacturing, processing to packaging. Nanomaterials bring about a great difference not only in the food quality and safety but also in health benefits, where many organizations, researchers, and industries are coming up with novel techniques, methods, and products that have a direct application of nanotechnology in food science.

Nanotechnology Applications in Foods  

The applications of nanotechnology in food sector can be segregated into two main groups;

1. Food nanostructured ingredients

Food nanostructured ingredients encompass a wide area from food processing to food packaging. In food processing, theses nanostructures can be used as food additives, carriers for smart delivery of nutrients, anti-caking agents, antimicrobial agents, fillers for improving mechanical strength and durability of the packaging material, etc.

2. Food nano-sensing

The food nano-sensing can be applied to achieve better food quality and safety evaluation. In this review, we have summarized the role of nanotechnology in food science and food microbiology and also discussed some negative facts associated with this technology.

Applications of nanotechnology have emerged with increasing need of nanoparticle uses in various fields of food science and food microbiology, including food processing, food packaging, functional food development, food safety, detection of foodborne pathogens, and shelf-life extension of food and/or food products. However, aspects of application of nanotechnology in relation to increasing the nutrition and organoleptic properties of foods also should be considered from the perspectives of safety issues and regulatory concerns on nano-processed food products. Since, companies and institutes in many part of the world are currently conducting industrial researches and developing applications in fields such as the treatment of the mechanical and sensorial properties of food i.e. to achieve changed taste or texture and modified nutritional value, but such applications need to be pretested thoroughly before human use. Nanotechnology may also be used in food packaging, for instance to ensure better protection or to detect how fresh food is, where specific properties and characteristics of nanomaterials need to be considered for any potential health risks.