Sugar content and bacterial contamination levels are important indicators for the health and safety of food, respectively. Therefore, it is important to construct a method that can detect both glucose and bacterial activity. Herein, natural compounds (gallic acid and glucose oxidase) were assembled into nanozyme (GOx@GA-Fe (ii)) for mild cascade detection. The nanozyme catalyzes glucose to produce hydrogen peroxide, which is then converted to ·OH and oxidized colorless TMB from blue oxidized TMB. Under the optimal conditions, the method has a good linear relationship in the glucose concentration range of 1–500 μM (R2 = 0.993) with minimum detection concentration of 0.43 μM. Based on the glucose consumption of bacteria metabolism, the cascade reaction was then applied to detect the viability of 5 common bacteria. As such, a cascade method based on a natural self-assembled nanozyme was fabricated to monitor the quality of food.
