The work aims to establish an effective phthalate plasticizer usage specification and regulatory system, and the method used to detect the content of phthalate plasticizer in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) food packaging materials by attenuated total reflectance (ATR)-infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Taking PVC food packaging material as the research object, phthalate plasticizers were determined directly by ATR-FTIR method. PVC with phthalate mass fraction in the range of 0.5% to 35% had two infrared characteristic peaks at 1610 to 1570 cm−1 and 750 to 720 cm−1; the correlation coefficient was 0.9994, and the linear relationship was good; the relative standard deviations of precision measured in such method were all less than 5.0%; and the absolute relative deviations of accuracy were all within 10%. The method is simple, rapid and environmentally friendly, and can meet the requirements for rapid detection of phthalate plasticizers in PVC food packaging materials.