Flexible sensing enabled agri-food cold chain quality control: A review of mechanism analysis, emerging applications, and system integration

•Flexible sensors replace rigid sensors for sensing, monitoring, and detecting of agri-food.•The interaction between multiple quality parameters and the quality of agri-food is revealed.•The performance requirements for flexible sensors in the cold chain of agri-food are analyzed.•Limited cold chain space, multi-scale flexible sensors achieve more functions in a smaller space.•Intelligent devices integrating flexible and AI technologies improve the efficiency of agri-food quality control.