Abstract: Fingerprint technology is based on a certain characteristic of the sample. It uses modern analysis methods to obtain chromatogram, spectra and other spectral data that can represent the characteristics of the sample, so as to carry out component identification and quality control. It is a quantifiable method that is fast, sensitive, convenience and other advantages. It is a quantifiable method that has the advantages of rapid, sensitive and convenient. It is not only widely used in the traditional Chinese medicine industry, but also have huge application potential in food sources, quality testing and authenticity identification. The commonly used technical means of fingerprints include high performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, capillary electrophoresis and other chromatographic methods, ultraviolet spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy and other spectroscopy methods, biological fingerprints and nonlinear chemical fingerprints, etc. Analysis methods mainly include chemical pattern recognition and other similarity evaluation methods. This paper mainly introduces the common technical methods and analysis methods of fingerprints, and summarizes the application of chemical fingerprint, biological fingerprint and non-linear chemical fingerprint in many fields such as food origin, species identification, adulteration identification, identification of famous and excellent products, batch consistency evaluation and variety selection. At the same time, the future development of food fingerprints is prospected.