Electrochemical biosensors for food spoilage, quality monitoring, and food safety: recent advances, sensor performance, and smart packaging integration

Ensuring food safety and preventing spoilage are major challenges in today’s globalized food supply chain. Conventional detection methods, such as microbial culture, dye reduction tests, and sensory evaluation, are often slow, labour-intensive, and unsuitable for rapid on-site applications. This highlights the urgent need for real-time, accurate, and user-friendly technologies to monitor food quality and protect consumer health. Electrochemical biosensors have emerged as next-generation tools for detecting food spoilage and monitoring food safety. These devices combine biological recognition elements with electrochemical transducers to convert biochemical interactions into measurable electrical signals. This review summarizes recent advances (2023–2025) in electrochemical biosensing systems tailored for food applications. Various sensor types, detection mechanisms, and their performance in identifying spoilage indicators, pathogens, toxins, and chemical contaminants across different food matrices are systematically discussed. Specific spoilage and safety-related analytes, including L-lactic acid in milk and wine, histamine and putrescine in fish, volatile organic compounds such as hexanal and 1-octen-3-ol, deoxynivalenol in cereal products, pathogenic bacteria such as

Salmonella

and

Staphylococcus aureus

, pesticide residues, antibiotic residues, and heavy metals, are discussed across meat, seafood, dairy, fruit, vegetable, grain, and beverage matrices. Reported sensor performances demonstrate high sensitivity, with examples including L-lactic acid detection at 1 μM, histamine detection around 0.97 mg/L, VOC detection at 0.1 μM, and deoxynivalenol detection down to 0.24 mg/L. Innovations such as nanomaterial-modified electrodes, flexible and microfluidic platforms, and integration into intelligent packaging are highlighted as key contributors to enhanced sensitivity, portability, and real-time data analytics. Electrochemical biosensors show strong potential to reduce food waste by enabling early spoilage detection and timely intervention. While challenges in cost, long-term stability, regulatory validation, and industrial standardization remain, continued technological development and interdisciplinary collaboration will drive their adoption in sustainable and digitalized Food Safety 4.0 systems.