A Comprehensive Review of Biomimicry in Food: Biomimetic Foods, Food Processing, Food Packaging, Food Freezing, and Food Quality Inspection

Biomimetic technologies, inspired by nature's design principles, are increasingly driving the food industry toward more sustainable, efficient, and health-focused systems. This review provides a comprehensive and critically integrated overview of biomimetic technologies across five major domains: biomimetic foods, food processing, food packaging, food freezing control, and food quality inspection. Biomimetic meat and dairy products, derived from plants, animal cells, or microorganisms, can approximate the sensory and nutritional profiles of conventional foods, while reducing reliance on livestock, improving animal welfare, and lowering environmental burdens. In food processing, robotic systems enhance efficiency, hygiene, and worker safety, whereas three-dimensional (3D) printing enables precise control of food structure and composition, expanding opportunities for personalized nutrition. In food packaging, biomimetic strategies, such as superhydrophobic surfaces, self-healing materials, nanostructured antimicrobial interfaces, and indicator packaging systems, improve barrier performance and contamination control while enabling real-time freshness monitoring. Biomimetic freezing-control materials, such as ice-nucleating proteins, antifreeze proteins, and natural deep eutectic solvents, modulate ice nucleation, crystal growth, and recrystallization, thereby mitigating freezing-induced deterioration in food texture and quality. In food quality inspection, artificial sensory systems that emulate olfaction, taste, and vision enable rapid, nondestructive evaluation of food quality and authenticity. Across these domains, major barriers to industrialization remain, including scalability, cost, standardization, safety assessment, and regulatory feasibility. Collectively, these biomimetic strategies underscore the expanding role of nature-inspired design in food science and engineering and provide a forward-looking perspective on the development of safer, higher quality, and more sustainable food systems with clearer implications for industrial translation.