During recent years the market for convenience foods has grown rapidly. More and more consumers prefer ready-to-eat (RTE) products because of their advantageous minimal input of time and effort. The increasing awareness of health means there is a need for nutritious, high quality ready meals. Due to technological developments, the packaging industry is continuously coming up with innovative packaging. This is being driven by ecological challenges, policy, and consumer demands. However, only a few studies have hitherto been published on innovative packaging concepts for RTE food. The purpose of this review is to evaluate the status quo and recent progress in this area. It is important to understand the crucial factors for food packaging for RTE food, namely food safety and quality. Packaging concepts have focused on preventing microbial growth, so protecting consumers from food-borne diseases. Bio-based packaging materials such as polylactic acid and chitosan have limited mechanical properties. The use of nanomaterials or natural essential oils to replace synthetic additives could alleviate this. The combination with modified atmosphere packaging showed improvements and prolongation of the shelf life.

Egg white (EW) is required to be reduced in viscosity and particle size prior to chromatographic fractionation of single EW proteins. This study reports on an assessment of various shear devices for this purpose. Evaluation criteria for the head-to-head comparison of high-pressure homogenization, colloid mill, and toothed disc dispersing machine treatment were the achieved viscosity reduction as well as the network diminution, determined by particle size measurements. It was shown that each of the devices was able to decrease the viscosity by a reduction of fibril size. However, only the high-pressure homogenizer fulfills the requirement to disintegrate the fibrils sufficiently, so that they can be filtered through membranes with a pore size of 0.45 μm, which is indispensable for chromatographic fractionations. Generally, the achieved viscosities decreased with increasing energy input, independently of the specific shear forces resulting from the applied device. Otherwise, there was no direct correlation between the energy density and the extent of fibril destruction, indicating that the kind of energy depending on the respective device with its specific destruction mechanism was not decisive. To sum up, this study provides profound knowledge concerning the effects on the EW structure that result from different mechanical forces.