Physical antimicrobial strategies, including a wide range of physics-based antimicrobial techniques, have aroused extensive interests in recent years and have been widely applied in food system, for disinfection purposes to maintain food safety and safeguard public health. Physical antimicrobial techniques are popular due to their outstanding properties such as efficient, clean, cost-effective and environmentally-friendly, besides, a majority of them do not induce negative impact on the qualities of foodstuffs during and after processing, which is an essential feature for a qualified food processing technology. Normally, physical antimicrobial techniques could be divided into two major aspects, i.e., thermal and non-thermal antimicrobial techniques. In this chapter, the thermal antimicrobial techniques including the heat-transfer-associated electromagnetic waves (e.g., microwave, infrared ray and solar radiation) and temperature controls (e.g., pasteurization and refrigeration), as well as non-thermal antimicrobial techniques such as the heat-transfer-unassociated electromagnetic waves (e.g., blue and ultraviolet lights, along with X and gamma rays), photodynamic inactivation, filtration, electric field, ultrasound, cold plasma and high hydrostatic pressure are critically reviewed, through clarifying their definitions and antimicrobial mechanisms, along with presenting their past and up-to-date concrete studies to deepen our understandings on the applications of these antimicrobial techniques in food industries, as well as concluding and criticizing their advantages and disadvantages to apply in food systems. Lastly, the future prospectives in this field are proposed, striving for seeking better strategies to improve the efficiencies of the physical antimicrobial techniques currently developed, as well as expecting the appearances of cutting-edge and more efficient techniques based on novel physical antimicrobial mechanisms.