In recent years, food design has increasingly become a popular subject within the realms of Chinese design research and practice, and it has also emerged as a representative field in interdisciplinary design research and practice. To grasp the progress of food design research both in China and abroad, the work aims to employ the CNKI database and the Web of Science Core Collection as sources of data from China and abroad and analyze the field of food design in China and abroad combined with the qualitative analysis. Firstly, by employing visualization software for bibliometric analysis such as CiteSpace and R package bibliometrix, a research literature knowledge map in the field of food design in China and abroad was constructed. Secondly, through an analysis on the temporal distribution characteristics of literature and features of key papers, the historical development trajectory of the field of food design was delineated. Next, by conducting co-occurrence analysis of