The development of policies and regulations to address food safety concerns depends critically on appropriate assessment of health risk in foods. This paper evaluates the methods for assessing the population's exposure to a hazardous substance or contaminant in food and some aspects of the quantification of risk. We review current federal programmatic approaches to risk assessment and potential problems with these approaches. After developing procedures for estimating exposures of individuals in a population to chronic and to acute risks, we illustrate their application by using available food consumption data to estimate exposure and highlight issues related to the data requirements for risk assessment.