The contamination of foodborne pathogenic bacteria poses great threats to human health. Conventional foodborne pathogen detection methods suffer from the shortcomings of time-consuming, cumbersome, and non-real time. Hence, it is of great significance to explore a sensitive, safe, simple and economical method for foodborne pathogen detection. Compared with the traditional methods, nano-biosensor-based detection assays possess merits such as exceptional sensitivity, high selectivity, real-time detection, low consumption and low limit of detection. In this article, these nano-biosensor-based methods are summarized, and the principles and advantages of single-, dual- and multi-mode detection are comprehensively discussed. Meanwhile, an outlook on the application of nano-biosensors for the detection of foodborne pathogens is given with the goal of providing a reference for the optimization of the existing detection methods for foodborne pathogenic bacteria.