New EU Novel Food Regulation – What happens next?
The long awaited new novel food regulation has finally made its very welcome arrival to update and streamline the approach to gaining approval for new food and food ingredients in the EU. It’s main benefits are to clarify the scope and definitions, to introduce a centralised procedure and to introduce a notification process for “traditional foods from third countries”. Whilst it also introduces a generic “Union List”, it also allows proprietary submissions in some cases. Although the actual legal enactment is not until January 2018, there is so much to do in the meantime.