Model‐Based Active Food Packaging: Materials‐Transport Coupling for State‐Dependent Mobility Maps, Right‐Sized Dosing, and Robust Scale‐Up

Active food packaging is advancing from static barrier layers to programmable mass-transfer systems in which polymer chemistry, carrier architecture, and package geometry determine when, where, and how fast active species are released, scavenged, or transformed. Here, programmable mass transfer is defined as the deliberate control of time- and space-dependent fluxes through four main levers: active loading and speciation, carrier affinity, layer thickness and placement, and package geometry with boundary conditions. Relative to reviews published in the past 3 years that mainly organize the field by material class, active function, or broad sustainability trends, this paper contributes an integrated design framework built around state-dependent mobility and partition maps, right-sized dosing from target concentration-time trajectories, transferability criteria for model calibration, and a retort practicality window based on barrier recovery and active kinetics at 0 h, 24 h, and 7 days. The review covers molecular and mesoporous carriers, electrospun and emulsion-based architectures, stimuli-responsive systems, oxygen and carbon-dioxide management, antimicrobial and antioxidant modules, and retortable structures under compliance and circularity constraints. Across these topics, emphasis is placed on replacing single-condition "book values" with operating-window parameter maps that include temperature, relative humidity, condensation history, weak-link regions, and external mass-transfer resistance. Safety-by-design is treated as a coequal objective through immobilized actives, worst-case migration and NIAS control, and standardized reporting suited to cold-chain validation. A scale-up roadmap is finally outlined that couples mechanistic models, data-driven surrogates, and in-pack sensing to deliver robust performance with recyclable monomaterial or ultrathin-coated architectures.