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.

The risks associated with the presence of hidden allergens in food have increased the need for rapid, sensitive, and reliable methods for tracing food allergens in commodities. Conventional enzyme immunosorbent assay (ELISA) has usually been performed in a centralized lab, requiring considerable time and sample/reagent consumption and expensive detection instruments. In this study, a microfluidic ELISA platform combined with a custom-designed optical sensor was developed for the quantitative analysis of the proteins wheat gluten and Ara h 1. The developed microfluidic ELISA biosensor reduced the total assay time from hours (up to 3.5 h) to 15–20 min and decreased sample/reagent consumption to 5–10 μL, compared to a few hundred microliters in commercial ELISA kits, with superior sensitivity. The quantitative capability of the presented biosensor is a distinctive advantage over the commercially available rapid methods such as lateral flow devices (LFD) and dipstick tests. The developed microfluidic biosensor demonstrates the potential for sensitive and less-expensive on-site determination for rapidly detecting food allergens in a complex sample system.

Infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), an avian coronavirus, significantly affects the performance of both the egg-laying and meat-type birds causing the foremost of economic loss in poultry industry. This study aims to develop a rapid, low-cost and sensitive biosensor for IBV detection by using molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). MoS2 is a two-dimensional nano-sheet which has strong high fluorescence-quenching ability when applied to a dye-labeled antibody. In this work, we developed an antibody-functionalized MoS2 based fluorescent immunosensor, which utilized the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between the MoS2 and fluorescence dye during the antibody-antigen interaction. The assay was performed on a low-cost cotton thread-based microfluidic platform due to the good wicking property and flexibility. Upon the optimization of assay conditions, the immunosensor demonstrated remarkable sensitivity of 4.6×102 EID50 per mL and specificity with a dynamic linear response range of 102 EID50 per mL to 106 EID50 per mL for IBV standard solutions. The developed immunoassay successfully detected the IBV spiked chicken serum with satisfactory results. The foregoing presents its potential application for on-farm detection.