The work aims to study the major research direction, development trend and frontier hotspots in the field of food packaging. The core journal citation index database Web of Science was used to search the literatures titled “Food Packaging”. After selected and extracted, the literatures were exported to CiteSpace citation analysis software to study the overview of food packaging field from the perspectives of time distribution, author distribution, geographical distribution and journal distribution. Then, citation analysis, word frequency detection, burst word detection and other methods were applied to study the significant food packaging literature, research hotspots at different time periods and frontier trends in the field, and verify the accuracy of frontier hotspot analysis results by burst word detection. The research papers in the field of food packaging to be published in 2019 were expected to be no less than 2,000 articles. The research direction of important literatures in the field of food packaging in 2009-2019 were nanomaterials, chitosan films, essential oils, food packaging systems, lactic acid, active packaging, and 6 papers had high centrality. There were 22 major research hotspots, including the main technologies of food packaging, the main components of packaging materials, and the types of foods to be packaged. In the past 3 years, the research front in the field of food packaging presented: from single packaging performance study (mechanical properties, antibacterial properties) to rich packaging needs research (human health, sterilization performance) to innovative packaging materials (chitosan, nanomaterials, biodegradable material) research. The CiteSpace-based scientific knowledge map mining covers the research overview, research hotspots and frontier development trends in the field of food packaging.