Fruit ripening and quality formation is an important stage of plant fruits, which are regulated by many regulatory factors divided into positive regulatory factors and negative regulatory factors. In the past, the research on fruit ripening regulation mainly focused on the identification and functional analysis of positive regulatory factors, but now the negative regulatory factors related to fruit ripening have gradually attracted the attention of researchers. This review summarizes the negative regulatory factors related to fruit ripening and quality formation. According to the regulation mode to key genes related to ripening and quality formation, they can be divided into four categories including transcriptional repressors involved in transcriptional level regulation, negative regulatory factors involved in post transcriptional level, post-translational level regulation, and other negative regulatory factors, and we discuss and prospect the related follow-up research directions in this article.