Objective The combined use of food preservatives and other functional additives in China was analyzed, and the exposure assessment and cumulative risk assessment based on the detection content were carried out for the combination of common preservatives and other functional additives. Methods According to the combined use of preservatives and other functional additives in food in China in the Global New Products Database ( GNPD ), the food safety monitoring data from 2015 to 2023, and the food consumption data of Chinese residents from 2018 to 2020, a simple distribution model was used to calculate the exposure of common preservatives and other functional additives in the general population of China, and the cumulative risk assessment was performed using the Hazard index ( HI ) method. Results Among the combinations of preservatives and other functional additives used in China, the highest utilization rate is the four-element combination ( 18.78 % ), followed by the three-element combination ( 17.31 % ) and the five-element combination ( 15.97 % ), and the most is the thirteen-element combination. Considering the risk of exposure to food additives alone, the average daily exposure and daily P95 exposure of sodium benzoate, sodium cyclamate, saccharin sodium and tartrazine in the general population were much lower than their acceptable daily intake ( ADI ). The cumulative risk assessment based on the detection content found that only one individual 's HI was greater than 1 in the use of ternary or quaternary combinations, and the proportion of individuals with HI greater than 1 in the quinary combination was only 0.08 %. Conclusion The health risks of common ternary, quaternary and quinary preservatives combined with other functional additives in China are at an acceptable level. In the future, it is necessary to further clarify the use scenarios of additives and the synergistic and antagonistic effects between different additives in the composite system, so as to more accurately assess and predict the cumulative risk of food additives.