Food safety is of paramount importance especially in this era of extensive use of packaged and processed foods. The reasons for this are manifold—pathogens becoming more resilient and resistant and evolving at higher rates. The conventional ways of detection demands sophisticated instruments, time, trained personnel etc. Hence there is a dire need to devise user-friendly, highly sensitive and low-cost biosensors for foodborne microbial detection be it in fresh unprocessed plant products or processed food items. Nanobiosensors (NBS) owing to their high sensitivity, small size, very high surf to volume ratio which when combined with high accuracy optical imaging offer promising solutions to this global public health concern. The present review gives a glimpse of the latest technologies in the field of NBS in food borne microbial detection which includes graphene nanomaterials, quantum dot nanomaterials, metal nanoparticles and metal organic frameworks, carbon dots etc. The advantages of these NBSs, possible problems which can come up while upscaling the technique and its potential applications are also discussed.