Rubia cordifolia, commonly known as Indian Madder, is a highly valuable and well-known medicinal plant that belongs to the coffee family, Rubiaceae (Chandrashekar et al., 2018). The root extract of R. cordifolia has a potent antioxidant, antimicrobial, antiviral and free radical scavenging activity owing to a range of bioactive metabolites (Chandrashekar et al., 2018;Martelli & Giacomini, 2018).Recently, R. cordifolia mediated nanoparticles were developed by Ahn et al. (2019) who observed antioxidant and free radical scavenging properties of the developed silver nanoparticles. However, no study has explored the potential of R. cordifolia as an active ingredient for edible and biodegradable films for food applications. Being a rich source of polyphenols, flavonoids, and free radical scavengers (Chandrashekar et al., 2018;Martelli & Giacomini, 2018), its use as a bioactive ingredient in food packaging is highly justifiable.