Natural anthocyanins: Sources, extraction, characterization, and suitability for smart packaging

Anthocyanins, natural water-soluble colorants, have increasingly gained attention owing to their attractive features such as diverse colors at varying pHs, biocompatibility, and potential health-promoting properties. These multifunctional characteristics offer attractive opportunities for their novel applications across food packaging industries. In this context, this review attempts to comprehensively overview the most recent progress in anthocyanins and assemble important developments of their sources, extraction pathways, and characterization to potentially broaden their applications in various fields. We present a comprehensive overview of a broad range of functional properties of anthocyanins such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, and pH-sensitive properties. Despite many beneficial features of anthocyanins, their inherent instability against certain environmental conditions is posing a substantial challenge for their applications in food packaging systems. The literature indicates that anthocyanins have an immense potential to be considered as a suitable pH indicator in intelligent food packaging systems. These innovations have been demonstrated to improve the safety and quality of food products and could be used as a reliable, accurate, and fast tool for visually tracking their freshness and/or spoilage. This review also provides insights into the reinforcement of anthocyanins inside packages containing a broad range of food products such as meat, seafood, and dairy products. This review has found that anthocyanins as a powerful tool, have countless of potential advantages for the purpose of smart packaging development to monitor the freshness of food products.