At present, most code printings of food packaging are still inspected artificially. It will cause miss or error inspection in a certain extent, so that the food security will be impacted. A visual inspection method for food package code printing is put forward to solve this problem. Using LabVIEW as the development platform, a visual inspection system of code printing was developed. The key steps of image acquisition, preprocessing, orientation and recognition are detailed introduced. Finally, tests were performed on the samples. The results showed that the recognition accuracy of this method was high, thus the automatic sorting of food packaging could be achieved.