Artificial intelligence-enabled smart hydrogels for intelligent food packaging

Abstract

Food packaging is evolving from passive protection toward intelligent systems capable of monitoring food quality, responding to environmental changes, and supporting shelf-life management. Smart hydrogels have emerged as promising packaging materials because of their three-dimensional polymer networks, high water content, tunable structures, biodegradability, biocompatibility, and stimuli-responsive characteristics, which enable multifunctional sensing and adaptive responses that are difficult to achieve simultaneously with conventional static polymeric materials in dynamic food-packaging environments. Smart hydrogels allow real-time detection of environmental storage parameters, including temperature and humidity, as well as food-quality and spoilage-related parameters, such as pH, volatile organic compounds, and microbial metabolites. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) provides powerful tools for processing multimodal sensing data, freshness evaluation, spoilage prediction, and remaining shelf-life estimation. This review summarizes recent advances in AI-enabled smart hydrogel systems for intelligent food packaging. Particular attention is given to the complementary roles of smart hydrogels as sensing and response materials and AI as the decision-making engine for data interpretation and predictive control. Representative applications in fruit, vegetable, and meat packaging are discussed, together with emerging strategies involving multimodal sensing, controlled antimicrobial release, and predictive quality management. Finally, current challenges, including hydrogel stability, data availability, model interpretability, and industrial scalability, are highlighted, and future perspectives for sustainable, intelligent, and data-driven food packaging are proposed. Future advances in materials science and AI technologies are expected to accelerate the development of autonomous and sustainable intelligent packaging systems.