Emerging coating technologies for food and beverage packaging materials

Coatings are increasingly recognized as a powerful tool to improve many of the properties of food and beverage packaging materials. The goal of this chapter is to provide an in-depth overview of the latest innovations in this area. Following a section reviewing coatings for food packaging materials from the past to the present, attention is then focused on the strategies recently adopted to design high-performance coatings, with special emphasis on the impact of nanotechnology. Applications of new types of coatings to improve food quality are then considered. Future trends in the field are discussed in the final section.