Development and Challenges of Food Contaminant Removal Technologies: Molecular Imprinting Technology as an Emerging Solution

Food contaminants, including plasticizers, pesticide residues, heavy metals, and biotoxins, pose persistent risks to food quality and human health. Their diverse sources, complex migration pathways, and potential long-term toxicity make removal difficult. Conventional removal technologies, such as physical treatment, chemical degradation, adsorption, membrane separation, and biological methods, can reduce contaminant levels to varying degrees. However, they often show limited selectivity, matrix interference, harsh operating requirements, or losses of nutritional and functional components. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are synthetic recognition materials with binding sites tailored to a target contaminant. Their template-induced cavities provide complementarity in size, shape, and functional-group arrangement, enabling selective adsorption in complex matrices. Recent studies apply MIPs to the enrichment, detection, and removal of plasticizers, pesticide residues, heavy metals, and biotoxins. Unlike recent surveys centered on MIP-assisted analysis and sensing, this review uses contaminant removal as the organizing problem and compares MIP-based strategies with conventional decontamination across four hazard classes. MIPs offer tunable selectivity, chemical stability, and reusability, but practical food applications still face template leakage, slow mass transfer, incomplete safety evaluation, matrix dependence, and scale-up limitations. Future work should prioritize green synthesis, surface imprinting, magnetic recovery, and systematic validation in real food matrices. To prevent analytical extraction from being conflated with remediation, the evidence is classified from proof-of-binding and analytical cleanup to edible-matrix treatment and process validation, and representative studies are compared using capacity, removal or recovery, equilibration time, selectivity, reuse, and matrix validation. Recent evidence also reveals substantial gaps for PFAS, microplastics, and nanoplastics: selective recognition is advancing, but food-safe removal remains largely unvalidated.