Traditional soy products are rich in nutrition and contain high water content, but easy to rot. In particular, fresh soy products have short shelf life and must be refrigerated at low temperature for transportation and storage. These seriously affect the product quality of traditional soy products and the edible safety of consumers, which obviously limit the output of production and processing enterprises and the scale of industrial development. It has increasingly become a research hotspot to determine the source and species of spoilage bacteria in traditional soy products, analyze the correlation between different spoilage bacteria and the quality change of soy products, adopt safe and effective methods to inhibit them and effectively extend shelf life. In this paper, the causes and ways of spoilage of traditional soybean products were summarized from the aspects of planting soil, seed coat microorganisms and endogenous microorganisms, pretreatment of raw materials, heating residues, potential safety hazards brought by processing accessories, incomplete cleaning of equipment, and storage environment. During the storage and production of raw materials, high standards and strict hygiene management should be carried out. The sources, spoilage phenomena and polluted soy products of main microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi causing the spoilage of traditional soy products were summarized. During the storage of traditional soy products, based on the dynamic changes of different dominant bacterial communities in the spoilage bacteria system, it was the key to effectively extend the shelf life via systematically separating and identifying spoilage bacteria by traditional methods combined with modern technology and inhibiting them according to specific spoilage bacteria. And the bacteriostatic methods and mechanism of physical sterilization, chemical bacteriostasis and biological preservation used for the spoilage bacteria of traditional soy products were elaborated. According to the characteristics of different traditional soy products and spoilage bacteria, new physical sterilization technology combined with safe, efficient and effective biological methods, especially the application of microbial bacteriostatic agents, provided unique advantages for effectively prolonging the shelf life of traditional soy products, and made a prospect in order to provide reference for the new direction of traditional soy products preservation.