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Even though research on nanotechnology has increased rapidly in the last decades, the application of nanotechnology in food and beverage packaging started to show an interest in the scientific community much more recently. Food safety, quality and improvements of properties compared with conventional materials make nanomaterials very attractive in the field of food and beverage packaging applications. Furthermore, in many cases, nanomaterials are used for both food packaging and the food contained, especially when we talk about nanomaterials for active and intelligent packaging. Oxygen scavengers, antimicrobial nanomaterials and nanobiosensors are some examples of current research efforts on nanomaterials for food packaging. This fact has led to a variety of nanoparticles and nanomaterials. The wide range of existing nanomaterials could make its selection for food packaging applications a challenge. Thus, building up a map based on the current state-of-the-art nanoparticles and nanomaterials is required. Furthermore, there is a need to classify all the nanomaterials used specifically in food packaging, independently of their nature, the packaging material and the way they are integrated to this material. In this paper, a classification of the latest advances in this field was made accompanied by the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in order to find which are the most relevant (and/or expected to be potentially exploited in the near future) nanomaterials in the area of food packaging. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]