Biosensors for Food Safety and Adulteration Monitoring: Applications, Smart Packaging Integration, and Pathways to Intelligent, Field‐Deployable Detection Systems

Vollständiger Abstract

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ABSTRACT Food safety and authenticity remain major global public health concerns, necessitating rapid, sensitive, and cost‐effective analytical tools. This review critically evaluates recent advances in biosensing technologies for food safety monitoring, food adulteration detection, smart packaging, and data‐driven digital biosensing, providing an integrated perspective beyond the scope of previous reviews. Electrochemical, optical, and piezoelectric biosensors demonstrate remarkable analytical performance, enabling sub‐CFU pathogen detection and ppb‐level quantification of chemical contaminants across diverse food matrices, including milk, meat, seafood, cereals, and edible oils. Integration with smart packaging, such as colorimetric freshness indicators, pH‐responsive films, and on‐package contamination sensors, enables real‐time, non‐destructive quality assessment without conventional laboratory infrastructure. Furthermore, the convergence of biosensors with the Internet of Things (IoT), smartphone‐based imaging, machine learning, and cloud computing has accelerated the development of intelligent, connected food safety monitoring systems. Despite these advances, challenges related to matrix effects, long‐term stability, scalability, commercialization, standardization, and regulatory approval continue to hinder widespread implementation. This review critically discusses these limitations while highlighting commercialization strategies, technology readiness, and future research directions, including microfluidic integration, biodegradable sensing materials, explainable artificial intelligence, and blockchain‐enabled traceability, to support the development of reliable, scalable, and globally deployable food safety monitoring systems.