The packaging industry as one of the biggest target market for plastics, is obviously affected by the recent environmental concerns and there has been a huge investment on the domain of research and development in order to find more sustainable solutions for plastic material production. Polylactide (PLA) is the most used rigid biodegradable and biobased packaging (1). There are strict regulations by the European Union for new packaging materials to be respected, since they come in contact with food products (2). In this project, the chemical and microbiological safety aspects of PLA packaging material were analyzed. As an application, a real life conditioning experiment of ham inside PLA trays compared to commonly used poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) trays under modified atmosphere was carried out.