In the process of food production and circulation, the risk of food safety is mainly caused by the food supplier. The selection of food suppliers is a typical multiple attribute decision making problem. Considering the convenience of language information, we propose new SIR method for solving linguistic multiple attribute decision making problems. The superiority and inferiority matrices are obtained by semantic transformation and distance formula. The connection coefficient matrix can be derived using grey correlation coefficient formula. In the end, a practical application for food supplier selection is demonstrated to indicate the feasibility, reasonability and applicability of the proposed methodology.