Food safety and food quality are of paramount importance. We expect packaged food to be fresh and uncontaminated but occasionally the security of the food chain does break down. As a result, product protection and the prevention of foreign contamination are now significantly higher up the packaging development agenda.

We are now seeing developments in oxygen scavenging technologies, the use of antimicrobial materials, and a whole new field of diagnostic packaging providing colour change signals triggered by the presence of certain pathogens.

Food safety can be enhanced by simple time-temperature indicator labels that are far superior to the normal "use by" or "sell by" coding since they respond to high temperature excursions that can occur, for example, when perishable products are not correctly refrigerated. The labels are a few cents each (example 1) and are used on more than 400 food products in one of France's most innovative retailers, Monoprix.

Certain fruit products are picked unripe and shipped to market. Our modern sophisticated society allows dozens of people to grubbily handle, squeeze, press and pummel fresh fruit and vegetables in markets and supermarkets alike, looking for high quality, ripe specimens. Pity the poor people that buy such products after such handling. Much better to label the products with a colour change smart indicator that tells you by colour change that that particular piece of fruit is at optimum ripeness. Smart packaging is beginning to do this for pears with an active ripeness sensor being trialled by UK's Tesco. When the sensor is red the pears are crunchy, orange means firm, and yellow, juicy (see example 2).