Food is very easy to contaminate microorganism during production, processing, storage and transportation, the mass propagation of microorganism can cause food deterioration so that the food-borne pollution and food poisoning will occur with a serious threat to human health. However, the traditional methods for microorganism detection are complicated in process, poor in timeliness or low in sensitivity and are hard to meet the increasing requirements of the rapid and accurate detection, becoming the bottleneck for food quality and safety detection. With collecting the relevant information, then algorithm processing information and finally the relevant models, the modern optical imaging technique can achieve the rapid detection of food quality information. This article reviews in detail the latest developments of hyperspectral imaging and optical scattering techniques in the non-destructive detection of the food microbial contamination and discusses the advantages and deficiency of the various techniques.