**2. Developments in the food packaging**

The development of the packaging started with the traditional packaging systems. The accounts of archeologists and historians, according to the literature, tied the inception of food packaging with people becoming more nomadic and the need for them to protect, store and transport food and other goods. At that time, they made use of untreated natural resources they could lay hand on, such as animal skins, gourds, fashioned leaves and other plant materials. The advancement in people's ways of life translated to the enhancing the use of these resources in new fashioned way by making clay pots, weaving baskets using plant fibers and making bags from animal skins, which enabled storage and transportation of food materials between settlements. As people grew in population and advanced in lifestyles, innovation and creativity; sophisticated packaging system evolved to cater for their prevalent expectations. The packaging industry, thus, developed from the use of locally available natural resources in the traditional setting through to the use of sophisticated materials concerned with achieving four major functions of containment, protection, convenience and communication.

Traditional packaging materials, most of the times, target at providing containment, some protections and convenience with little or no regard to the communication aspect of packaging function [15]. Thus materials could be said to be readily available to meet up the supply needs of the industry, but fall short of some important ones. For example, plant materials like leaves used for packaging either as a direct wrapping or weaving/forming them into containers and baskets provided good packaging for containment with an insignificant contribution to preservation at long term and communication [16]. The shortcomings of the traditional packaging systems and man's quest for better packaging materials evolved the use of plant materials to produce paper and paper boards, which almost provided all the packaging functions of containment, protection, communication and convenience. Sarkar and Aparna [17] reported the changes packaging system passed through to attain the present status today in which materials such as paper and paperboard, metals, glasses, plastics and other materials designed by the blends of two or more of these aforementioned items for better packaging functions. According to literature, it took over 150 years for food packaging to undergo changes and finally emerge in its current form [18].

However, it is worthy to mention that the pattern of involvement of the materials in food packaging indicated that paper which took over from traditional materials had shortcomings of low strength, being opaque and high permeability to moisture, gases and vapors and hence, are unsuitable for adequate protection and preservation of food products. The glass developed to address these lapses, though provided the advantages of transparency, imperviousness, and inertness; but their fragility and heavy weight to strength ratio became limiting factors [1]. The first evidence of pottery and glass being made was about 7000 B.C., yet industrialization of the process by the Egyptians was not seen until about 1500 B.C. [19]. It is interesting to note that the primary materials used to make glass at that time, limestone, soda, sand, and silica, are the same materials that are used today, although many additives have been developed to color glass and give it varying properties [17].

The metal containers came into use in the 1700s for food packaging, and have excellent strength but their shape limitation was their main disadvantage [18]. Metal cans were initially manufactured for snuff, for which they provided an excellent barrier to products either from losing moisture, flavor, odors or absorbing same from their external environment [17]. The metal containers were later used in the canning operation that was discovered by Nicholas Appert when he answered a challenge from French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to develop a method to preserve food for his army [20]. The use of metal in packaging materials are still ongoing as they provide the expectations of man with regard to having ideal containment, protection, convenience and communication.

The involvement of plastics in food packaging was as a result exploration for better packaging materials. The ability of plastics to be made into thin films and containers is one of the most important advantages of involvement of plastics in packaging industry [2]. The benefits of involving plastics as packaging materials outweigh their demerits. Their use reduces packaging weight, volume, costs and ease of transportation of packaged food products. The involvement of plastics as packaging materials, facilitated evolution of technologically advanced packaging systems such as modified atmosphere or controlled atmosphere packaging, active packaging, intelligent packaging and others [11]. Also recent developments in food packaging have shown the involvement of ecofriendly materials like biodegradable or edible materials in food packaging system, in an effort to minimize problems of increasing environmental wastes occasioned by packaging materials. The development of food packaging from traditional through the conventional packaging to novel packaging systems showed a progressive improvement in the advancement in the contributions of packaging to

*The Place of Packaging System in Advancing Food Preservation for Promoting Food Products'… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108235*


#### **Table 2.**

*Traditional, conventional, and novel packaging materials and their impacts on food parameters.*

food industry as indicated in the **Table 2** below. Buckow and Bull [21], Pal et al. [14] and Hameed et al. [13] mentioned areas of improvement in the maintenance of quality, nutritional values, sensorial parameters and shelf-life, with longer storage period, as the packaging systems developed from traditional through the conventional to novel packaging, especially for the fresh-like or mildly processed food products being increasingly demanded by consumers.

### **2.1 Some of the pictures of the packaging materials**

The pictures showing examples of the various types of conventional packaging materials afore-mentioned in **Figures 1**–**7** below.

**Figure 1.** *Flexible paper packaging.*

**Figure 2.** *Rigid paper packaging.* *Food Processing and Packaging Technologies - Recent Advances*

**Figure 3.** *Rigid plastic packaging.*

**Figure 4.** *Flexible plastic packaging.*

**Figure 5.** *Flexible Aluminums foil food packaging.*

**Figure 6.** *Metal food packaging.* *The Place of Packaging System in Advancing Food Preservation for Promoting Food Products'… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108235*

**Figure 7.** *Glass packaging.*
