Since its inception in 2002, the European Food safety Authority (EFSA) has produced risk assessments for more than 4,400 substances in over 1,650 Scientific Opinions, Statements and Conclusions through the work of its Scientific Panels, Units and Scientific Committee. For each individual substance, a summary of human health, animal health and ecological hazard assessments has been collected and structured into EFSA’s Chemical Hazards Database: OpenFoodTox. OpenFoodTox provides open source data for substance characterisation, links to the relevant EFSA output, background regulations and summaries of critical toxicological endpoints. An online MicroStrategy tool enables the downloading of summary data sheets for each individual substance in PDF or Excel format. OpenFoodTox is a valuable tool and source of information for scientific advisory bodies and stakeholders with an interest in chemical risk assessment. This editorial provides a snapshot description of OpenFoodTox as an open source toxicological database for chemical risk assessment. EFSA provides scientific advice to risk managers and decision makers through risk assessment and risk communication on all issues related to ‘food and feed safety, animal health and welfare, plant health, nutrition, and environmental issues’ (Regulation EC No 178/2002). Risk assessment has been defined as ‘a scientifically based process consisting of four steps: hazard identification, hazard characterisation, exposure assessment and risk characterisation’ (Regulation EC No 178/2002; WHO, 2009). In food safety, hazard identification and characterisation aims to determine safe levels of exposure for substances for human health, animal health or the environment from pivotal toxicology studies that provide the basis for a reference point. The reference points are then divided by uncertainty factors to derive reference values. Examples of reference points/points of departure for human health and animal