There have been great efforts to develop a rapid and sensitive detection method to monitor the presence of pathogenic bacteria in food. While a number of methods have been reported for bacterial detection with a detection limit to a single digit, most of them are suitable only for the bacteria in pure culture or buffered solution. On the other hand, foods are composed of highly complicated matrices containing carbohydrate, fat, protein, fibers, and many other components whose composition varies from one food to the other. Furthermore, many components in food interfere with the downstream detection process, which significantly affect the sensitivity and selectivity of the detection. Therefore, isolating and concentrating the target pathogenic bacteria from food matrices are of importance to enhance the detection power of the system. The present review provides an introduction to the representative sample preparation strategies to isolate target pathogenic bacteria from food sample. We further describe the nucleic acidbased detection methods, such as PCR, real-time PCR, NASBA, RCA, LCR, and LAMP. Nucleic acid-based methods are by far the most sensitive and effective for the detection of a low number of target pathogens whose performance is greatly improved by combining with the sample preparation methods.