Advancing Sustainable Food Packaging: Harnessing Entomology for Functional Natural Matrices and Bionics Structural Designs

ABSTRACT Plastic food packaging has caused the increasingly severe environmental crisis and biological threats, which necessitates an urgent switch to regenerative alternatives. In this background, insect‐based materials have become a breakthrough advance in sustainable food packaging science. Insect‐based materials like chitin, proteins, and resins demonstrate biodegradability and superior film‐forming attributes coupled with potent bioactivity. Insect bionics (such as cicada wings, spider silk and beetle cuticles) offer innovative strategies to fortify mechanical resilience for food packaging, surface repellency, and contact‐killing antimicrobial efficacy. This review provides a comprehensive organization and summary of new processing technologies for insect materials. We critically explore the potential of insect resources in intelligent packaging functionalities, concomitantly analysing the crucial bottlenecks impeding their large‐scale industrialization. Ultimately, the application of insect resources will advance the development of green packaging science and technology, whose aim is for a more circular and eco‐friendly future.