Bibliometric methods were used to summarize the hotspots, context and research progress of food safety digital governance at home and abroad for its subsequent development. A total of 3 417 related articles from Web of Science (WOS) and 1 011 related articles from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) published between 2003 and 2023 were retrieved and analyzed based on annual publication volume, institutions, journals, authors and key words. CiteSpace software was employed to conduct a multidimensional knowledge graph visualization. The results showed that there has a growing interest in food safety digital governance and an increasing trend in the annual number of publications. China and United States were the most studied countries in this field. English literature journals were more concentrated, while Chinese literature journals were relatively scattered. The leading source of literature was the journal Food Science and Technology, which published 1 284 articles, accounting for 37.58% of the total number of English articles, whereas no Chinese journal accounted for more than 5%. The majority of institutional publications originated from Chinese universities, with China Agricultural University being the institution with the largest number of publications. However, the scholar with the highest number of publications was from Jiangnan University. Overall, authors had not yet formed a stable collaborative group, and the existing studies exhibited a lack of cooperation among authors and research institutions. Research hotspots have shifted from supply chain management to risk governance and subsequently to digital government, reflecting regional differences both domestically and internationally. Analysis of emergent keywords indicated that “artificial intelligence”, “blockchain” and “machine learning ” are current research hotspots.