Food monitoring is a tool to recognize and avoid potential risks to consumers. While the states enforce food law primarily through suspicion and risk-based investigations, food monitoring is a system of repeated representative measurements and evaluations of undesirable substances and contaminants in foods. The food monitoring programme is a joint investigative programme by the German Federal Government and the federal states which is complementary to official food control as carried out by the states. This report provides the results of the analysis in 2005 of more than 5000 samples of 50 foods or food groups of domestic and foreign origin.