Packaging of Agricultural Products, a Strategy to Reduce Waste

Supplying, saving, processing, distribution and consuming healthy and high quality foods are major objectives in food policy and marketing. Food packaging is an important issue to achieve these objectives and consequent customer satisfaction. In the past, the main role of packaging was to preserve food quality up to the stage of consumption. But now, the role of technological packaging is more diverse and includes protecting the product against any contamination, maintaining its integrity, the attractiveness of the product, ease of transportation, increased productivity and awareness by labeling of the necessary information on the package and ease of use.  Reaching these aims will help to achieve the goal of reducing product wastes. Hence, it seems that by addressing the packaging responsibility, the amount of agricultural wastes can be significantly reduced. In general, the role and place of packaging in the supply system of agricultural products can be summarized in the four main areas of food security, value added, wastes reduction, and energy saving. This paper focouses on the four above issues, while emphasizing on the sufficient knowledge and skills required on the basis of scientific and technical principles of packaging.