Food chemist are often employed with chemical investigation offices of the federal states, of cities or the military for the analysis and evaluations in the context of food monitoring. Furthermore they can be employed with ministries and law enforcement agencies.

Self-employed food chemists working in their own testing laboratory advise producers, importers and businesses by testing and legally evaltuating their goods. Often they are assigned by the industry and the chamber of commerce as testing chemists or expert witnesses for food chemistry and they are allowed by federal state authority to perform cross-checks.

In the industry of foodstuffs, cosmetics and consumer goods food chemists have wide functions in research and development laboratories and often they are responsible for the quality and the monitoring of the products.

In the research for foodsstuffs food chemists work at university laboratories, where they also help training students in becoming food chemists, or they work with federal or industrial research institutes.

On top of that there are many other occupational fields in laboratories and testing facilities dealing with drinking water, the environment (waste water, air and soil), in agriculture, in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, in chemical toxicology, forensics and clinical chemistry, i.e. in all fields where the special knowledge of a food chemist in the matter of the analysis of complex substrates and their evaluation is needed.

In the German Society of Food Chemistry food chemists from those various occupational fields come together to work on different issues.