Smart label/packaging in the food industry: a preliminary literature review

The most popular way for identifying and tracking objects is by adding labels which, during the fourth industrial revolution, so called Industry 4.0, have evolved from pure hand-written labels to barcodes, QR codes and RFId tags. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the extant literature on smart label/packaging, in order to understand their variety and diffusion for drawing future strategies for food business operators. Smart label/packaging may be defined as a recent business tool that may revolutionize the world of communication between company and consumer. The search was conducted as a structured keyword search: the library service of Scopus (www.scopus.com) was used to search for related material. The keywords “intelligent label” (hereafter, IL), “intelligent packaging” (hereafter, IP), “smart label” (hereafter, SL) and “smart packaging” (hereafter, SP) were used in the article title and text, abstract, and keywords of the above-mentioned library service. Quotation marks were used in order to specify terms which should appear next to each other. The first article selected dates back to 1994 and was written by Bahrami et al.; the most recent ones are from 2019. Most of the 43 selected papers may be classified as research article (N=25), conference paper (N=11), review (N=7). This paper aims at giving, also to consumers, an idea of the way smart labels are currently used in our society and of their massive application not only in the logistic field, but even in other non-food sectors and more recently for food products. This study also has some limitations: only one library service was consulted; therefore it would be necessary, for the sake of a broader point of view, to investigate at least some of the major publishers.