Plasma Surface Treatment for Enhancing Liquid Retention in Plastic Meat Packaging - poster

Management of meat exudate is still problematic to the fresh food packaging. The exudate gives an unappealing appearance in the packaged meat products and facilitates spoilage and growth of pathogenic microorganisms, accelerating the degradation of meat quality and safety. Different packaging solutions have been developed to scavenge the meat exudate in plastic packaging, such as soaking pads in plastic trays and foam trays with open-cell structure. However, the soaked pads and foam are non-recyclable and increase recycling complexity of plastic trays. Therefore, an innovative and fully recyclable plastic package is developed to act not only as primary packaging but also to scavenge the meat exudate. This is based on enhancing the performance of plastic packaging material itself through plasma treatment. Capillary recesses integrated into the plastic tray undergo localised plasma treatment to increase the wettability of the recesses and enhance their liquid pinning effect. This offers higher stability for liquid menisci and increases the retention capacity of the recesses. For PET substrates, an increase in liquid retention capacity of ~2.24 times is demonstrated for the recesses [1]. The new meat trays provide comparative capacity of liquid retention to the conventional absorbent pads while ensuring fully recyclable trays.