Smart packaging, an emerging technology in the food packaging industry incorporates both active and intelligent technologies. Consumer demand for natural products and increasingly extended and diverse supply chains required to feed the growing global population, mean that traditional packaging is becoming less capable of meeting the functional demands placed on it. To help ensure the commercial success of proposed smart packaging technologies a thorough understanding of consumers attitudes toward them is required. Understanding the cultural, social and cognitive factors that affect acceptance will help “fine tune” smart packaging development to best meet consumer preferences and needs and ensure that communication about the technologies effectively addresses consumer concerns and educates them on the benefits. This systematic review of 28 peer reviewed journal articles summarizes the current knowledge on consumer acceptance or rejection of active and intelligent packaging, and the behavioral forces behind those attitudes. Articles containing primary data and published in the English language over the last 10 years reporting consumer responses to active and/or intelligent packaging technologies in general or to more specific technologies that achieved the functional goals of active or intelligent packaging were obtained and analyzed for themes in the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Themes were organized into groups as to whether they identified control variables, moderating variables, barriers or motivations to purchase and the benefits of the technology. To develop a conceptual framework for understanding consumer preferences for smart packaging, the identified themes were integrated with several consumer behavior models including the theory of planned behavior and an attitude model. Consumer perceptions of smart packaging is a poorly covered research area with most research being clustered in Europe and a smaller cluster in the Americas so there were significant opportunities to build on the body of knowledge.

This paper presents a conceptual model, identifying the factors that impact the supply chain commercialisation of active and intelligent packaging across various food product types. The model was derived from interviews conducted with marketing and technical personnel across various food exporters, packaging manufacturers, relevant government agents and industry bodies with global perspectives based in New Zealand. The conceptual model theorises the relationships among the macro, sector and business factors that characterise an organisation, the perceived benefits of commercialising active or intelligent packaging, and the perceived barriers preventing commercialisation. Interactions between commercialising active and intelligent packaging and needing to meet packaging sustainability objectives were also identified. Developers of active and intelligent packaging can utilise the findings of this research to prioritise and refine their innovations better to suit the industry's needs within a sustainability framework.

A challenge in social marketing studies is the cognitive biases in consumers’ conscious and self-reported responses. To help address this concern, biometric techniques have been developed to obtain data from consumers’ implicit and non-verbal responses. A systematic literature review was conducted to explore biometric applications’ role in agri-food marketing to provide an integrated overview of this topic. A total of 55 original research articles and four review articles were identified, classified, and reviewed. It was found that there is a steady growth in the number of studies applying biometric approaches, with eye-tracking being the dominant method used to investigate consumers’ perceptions in the last decade. Most of the studies reviewed were conducted in Europe or the USA. Other biometric techniques used included facial expressions, heart rate, body temperature, and skin conductance. A wide range of scenarios concerning consumers’ purchase and consumption behaviour for agri-food products have been investigated using biometric-based techniques, indicating their broad applicability. Our findings suggest that biometric techniques are expanding for researchers in agri-food marketing, benefiting both academia and industry.