Designing Gels for Food Packaging

Dear Colleagues,

In the modern food industry, food packaging plays a role that cannot be overlooked as few foods are sold without packaging. Good packaging prevents waste and ensures that the food retains its desired quality throughout its shelf life. Gels, including hydrogels, aerogels, organogels, ionic gels, colloidal gels, etc., which have a semi-solid colloidal or polymer network and can be used for absorbing or loading various functional agents, have numbered applications in food packaging, so more research efforts are needed in this area. Most research interests are focused on the preparation and design of hydrogels from biopolymers such as chitosan, pectin, gelatin, cellulose and its derivatives, etc., and the application as active packaging materials or intelligent packaging materials, such as absorbent pads, and an indicator for food packaging applications, while very few articles have explored aerogels.

For this Special Issue, short communications, full research papers, and review papers on the topic of “Designing Gels for Food Packaging”, which aim at the design of functional gels for the food packaging applications, e.g., hydrogels, aerogels, and so on, and include the synthesis and characterization of the above-mentioned materials, are encouraged for submission. The gels designed in these papers are required to be included with the applications for food packaging or storage.

Dr. Changqing Ruan
Prof. Dr. Dan Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Gels is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.