Abstract The measurement of ϕ meson production is a unique tool to explore the characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma. The ϕ meson has a small interaction cross section therefore its yields and elliptic flow are good probes of the quark-gluon plasma properties. The ϕ meson production can be sensitive to the strangeness enhancement effect and can provide information about the flavor dependence of energy loss and elliptic flow. Measurements in different nucleus-nucleus collisions allow us to perform a systematic investigation of the nuclear matter effects, system size and geometry influence on ϕ meson production. The PHENIX experiment has measured transverse momentum spectra, nuclear modification factors R AB , and elliptic anisotropy parameter v 2 for ϕ mesons in p +Al, p / d / 3 He/Cu+Au collisions at s NN = 200 GeV and in U + U collisions at s NN = 193 GeV at midrapidity (∣ η ∣ < 0.35). The obtained results exhibit scaling of v 2 for ϕ mesons with eccentricity of participant nucleons (collision geometry), whereas the ϕ R AB values depend on the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions (system size). The comparison of experimental data on the ϕ meson to various model calculations (AMPT, iEBE-VISHNU and PYTHIA/Angantyr) suggests the importance of viscous hydrodynamics and the coalescence mechanism in describing the properties and hadronization of the QGP.