Widespread distributions of repetitive DNA elements in bacteria genomes are useful for analysis of genomes and should be exploited to differentiate food-borne pathogenic bacteria among and within species. Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC) sequence has been used for ERIC-PCR genomic fingerprinting to identify and differentiate bacterial strains from various environmental sources. ERIC-PCH genomic fingerprinting was applied to detect and differentiate four major Gram-negative food-borne bacterial pathogens, Esherichia coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and Vibrio. Target DNA fragments of pathogens were amplified by ERIC-PCR reactions. Dendrograms of subsequent PCR fingerprinting patterns for each strain were constructed, through which relative similarity coefficients or genetic distances between different strains were obtained numerically. Numerical comparisons revealed ERIC-PCR genotyping is effective for differentiation of strains among and within species of food-borne bacterial pathogens, showing ERIC-PCR fingerprinting methods can be utilized to differentiate isolates from outbreak and to determine their clonal relationships among outbreaks.