**Preface to "Innovative Research in the Food Packaging to Improve Food Quality and Shelf Life"**

Food packaging and shelf life have been the subject of remarkable research in recent years. They are so important because only by understanding a good storage system is it possible to avoid any food waste. Moreover, the best packaging has to prolong the food quality while also reducing the packaging volume or better, become itself biodegradable, and guarantee the nutritional characteristics of food products.

In particular, the increasing interest in reducing packaging wastes is becoming a rising problem, just considering that food packaging alone contributes to a huge portion of total packaging wastes in the world. On the other side, consumers judge the food quality based on appearance and freshness, but also using their awareness of the environmental implications of packaging. Nowadays, many technologies can be applied to improve food quality and shelf life, such the application of edible films or coatings, from biodegradable materials or biopolymers, trying to reduce the package barrier requirements, incorporating natural bioactive compounds and lengthening shelf life making packaging easily compostable.

The present Special Issue is aimed at gathering cross-disciplinary approaches to increase food quality and shelf life working on innovative processing or materials for food packaging in order to provide very new solutions to producers.

The editors particularly appreciate the efforts of all the authors who participated in this Special Issue.

In particular, the editors are very proud to have been able to collect fascinating papers from three international research groups, two of those reporting on experimental trials on chicken fillets. Two other papers are focused on innovative trays and pads for active packaging, and finally two other papers linked with the interesting as innovative "zero-waste" and "sustainable" approach to improve shelf life.

Studies on active packaging, shelf life and the effect of light exposure on a sweet wine were the Editors' research group's contributions.

The Editors wish you an enjoyable lecture.

**Valeria Rizzo, Giuseppe Muratore** *Editors*
