When encountered with an unfamiliar type of food, animals often do not immediately consume the food and may even give up feeding. The phenomenon, in which animals react to novelty after evaluating the potential risks and benefits of obtaining the novel food, is known as food neophobia. On the one hand, the color, type, and other characteristics of the novel food will affect the animals’ risk assessment. On the other hand, the animal’s attributes can also affect the level of food neophobia. For group-living animals, social factors such as dominance hierarchy and affinity are related to individual attributes such as food resource occupancy, exploration, and boldness, further affecting food neophobia. [Methods] In this study, we observed the first foraging behavior of 16 individuals of Père David’s Deer (Elaphurus davidianus) when facing five types of novel food from June to July in 2023 in Dafeng Père David’s Deer National Nature Reserve, Yancheng. We employed two generalized linear models (GLMs) in R version 4.3.1 to assess whether social factors (i.e., dominance, affinity indegree, affinity outdegree, and spatial association) and food types (black corn, yellow corn, purple cabbage, green cabbage, purple carrot, and orange carrot as control group) influenced the approaching latency (Model 1) and the feeding latency (Model 2). [Results] It took a shorter time for the deer to approach (Table 2, Fig. 2) and eat (Table 3, Fig. 3) the novel food when its color was close to that of their familiar food (orange carrot). Individuals with higher dominance spent less time approaching the novel food (Table 2), and individuals who were less friendly (individuals with less licking behavior toward other group members) spent less time hesitating before eating the novel food (Table 3). Individuals with the above social characteristics may be bolder and more exploratory, thus occupying more food resource. [Conclusion] We provide the first evidence for food neophobia of Père David’s Deer. The results indicate that types and colors of the novel food and individual’s social factors both affect the food neophobia in Père David’s Deer. Our study may provide advice for rewilding and food resource utilization of the endangered ungulate.