During the last decades, the food, pharmaceutical and many other industries have seen several changes in packaging technology and applications because of new consumer demands and market trends. These drivers can be summarized as requirements for high quality, freshness and extended shelf-life of products. On the other hand, public demand and awareness for food safety has become a significant concern. This prompted the public awareness to question food quality in stores and technological solutions that could prevent contamination and/or alert consumers, which may provide better public protection. In the past, most of the studies were directed to the improvement of structural properties of films and multilayer structures (mainly mechanical: strength, tear, toughness etc…) and much less interest was directed to functionality such as barrier, antibacterial/antimicrobial, oxygen scavenging, detection, biological interactions etc. In this study, the results of recent efforts directed towards addressing those concerns will be presented and discussed. In particular, films with antibacterial properties, structures that can detect food degradation by-products and some oxygen scavenging compounds and formulations will be presented and their results discussed.