Food packaging is important for food safety, shelf-life extension, cost-efficiency, environmental issues, and consumer convenience. In order to improve the performance of food packaging, active packaging is being developed. Antimicrobial packaging, a form of active packaging, is an extremely challenging technology that could control the microbial population and target specific microorganisms to provide higher safety and longer shelf-life food. The characteristics of different types of antimicrobial packaging systems, and their research and application are reviewed. The antimicrobials including inorganic, organic and natural antimicrobials in the antimicrobial packaging systems are reviewed. In the end, the future trends of antimicrobial packaging are described.