The emergence of different food additives and their active metabolites have been found to cause serious problems to human health. Thus, considering the potential effects on human health, developing the sensitive and credible analytical method in different foods is an important issue. Herein, the solvent-driven self-assembly Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) to rapid and sensitive detection of foods additives in different commercial products is reported. The assembly substrates are highly sensitive with excellent uniformity and reproducibility because of uniform-distributed and high-density hot spots. The sensitive analysis for ciprofloxacin (CF), diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), tartrazine and azodicarbonamide with 0.1 ppm level using this surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate are given, showing that the Au NPs arrays can serve as efficient SERS substrates for detection of food additives. More importantly, the SERS spectra of the several commercial liquor and sweet drink to evaluate the addition of illegal additives are obtained. This SERS active platform can be used as an effective strategy in detecting prohibited additives in the applications of food analysis.