Food packages made of recycled cardboard often contain relatively high proportions of mineral oils that can migrate into the packed food. These mineral oil mixtures consist of saturated hydrocarbons in large part, but contain also up to 25 % of aromatic compounds, some of which are suspected of being cancerogenic. It is state of the art to extract mineral oils from food or food packages using organic solvents and to split the extracted mineral oils into saturated (MOSH) and aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH) by liquid chromatography; the concentrations of compounds in both fractions is then determined by using gas chromatography. Since the liquid chromatographic separation of mineral oils is solely based on the components’ different polarity, cross contamination with substances which do not correspond to the class of MOAH (e.g. unsaturated hydrocarbons) can be expected. Scope of this work was the substance specific characterization of the MOAH fraction using high resolution gas chromatography. The individual components were classified into different substance categories, and a semi-quantitative identification of these components was performed. As a result of these analyses it was found, that the MOAH fraction consists of at most 70 % of aromatic compounds (alkylated 1- to 4-ring systems), and of at least 30 % of non-aromatic olefines. It can be assumed that the application of the conventional methods of analyses results in an overestimation of the MOAH fraction, which may lead to misinterpretation of the results achieved.