Current food production faces tremendous challenges from growing human population, maintaining clean resources and food qualities, and protecting climate and environment. Food sustainability is mostly a cooperative effort resulting in technology development supported by both governments and enterprises. Multiple attempts have been promoted in tackling challenges and enhancing drivers in food production. Biosensors and biosensing technologies with their applications, are being widely applied to tackling top challenges in food production and its sustainability. Consequently, a growing demand in biosensing technologies exists in food sustainability. Microfluidics represents a technological system integrating multiple technologies. Nanomaterials, with its technology in biosensing, is thought to be the most promising tool in dealing with health, energy, and environmental issues closely related to world populations. The demand of point of care (POC) technologies in this area focus on rapid, simple, accurate, portable, and low-cost analytical instruments. This review provides current viewpoints from the literature on biosensing in food production, food processing, safety and security, food packaging and supply chain, food waste processing, food quality assurance, and food engineering. The current understanding of progress, solution, and future challenges, as well as the commercialization of biosensors are summarized.

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A fully integrated microchip for performing cell lysis, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and quantitative analysis of DNA amplicons in a single step is described herein. The chip was built on glass substrate using an indium-tin-oxide (ITO) microheater and PDMS engraved microchannels, which integrated an electrochemical cell lysis zone, a continuous flow PCR module and capillary electrophoresis amperometric detection (CE-AD) system. The total length of the microchannel was 4625 mm for performing 25 cycles of flow-through PCR and was laid on a handheld form factor of 96 × 96 mm(2) area. The key to the fabrication of such a device lies in the use of a single medium to carry out different kinds of biochemical reactions and hence, a reagentless electrochemical cell lysis protocol was integrated on the microchip which was capable of lysing most cell types, including difficult to lyse gram positive bacteria. The lysate contained genomic DNA from a sample which was proven to be suitable for PCR reactions. Genetic analysis was successfully performed on the microchip with purified lambda phage genomic DNA and various cell types, including non-tumorigenic MCF-10A and tumorigenic MCF-7 human cell lines, gram negative bacteria Escherichia coli O157:H7, and gram positive bacteria Bacillus subtilis, at an optimized flow rate of 5 μl min(-1). For the detection of amplicon DNA, a CE-AD system was used, with semisolid alkaline agarose within the capillary microchannel to minimize interference from cell debris and for efficient resolution of DNA fragments. High signal to noise ratio during amperometric detection and the use of online FFT filtering protocol enhanced the limit of detection of DNA amplicons. Therefore, with a combination of portability, cost-effectiveness and performance, the proposed integrated PCR microchip can be used for one step genetic analysis of most of the cell types and will enable more accessible healthcare.

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Outbreaks of foodborne diseases related to fresh produce have been increasing in North America and Europe. Viral foodborne pathogens are poorly understood, suffering from insufficient awareness and surveillance due to the limits on knowledge, availability, and costs of related technologies and devices. Current foodborne viruses are emphasized and newly emerging foodborne viruses are beginning to attract interest. To face current challenges regarding foodborne pathogens, a point-of-care (POC) concept has been introduced to food testing technology and device. POC device development involves technologies such as microfluidics, nanomaterials, biosensors and other advanced techniques. These advanced technologies, together with the challenges in developing foodborne virus detection assays and devices, are described and analysed in this critical review. Advanced technologies provide a path forward for foodborne virus detection, but more research and development will be needed to provide the level of manufacturing capacity required.