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Food Law

“General Food Law” - EU Regulation 178/2002

Last updated: 26 March, 2024

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Summary

When the European Economic Community was formed, the initial focus was on the removal of barriers to trade. Differences in technical requirements were seen to restrict trade and so initial European measures in the food law area focused on agreeing harmonised controls to replace different national measures. Initial measures included veterinary requirements for fresh meat (1963) and agreed lists of colour additives (1964). The process of adopting harmonised measures was however slow. The Internal Market programme (1985-1992) gave a significant boost to the number of agreed measures but also created some additional structures with new or updated “framework” controls for certain sectors (e.g. food additives, contaminants, foods for particular nutritional uses). Throughout this period, the focus had been on removing barriers to trade.

With the increase in trade, there were increasing issues linked to the safety of food products. The BSE crisis (early 1990s) in the UK was a major concern for food safety across the EU. The close relationship at that time between the process of scientific risk assessment and the more political risk management decisions was considered to have been a factor in the drop in consumer confidence in the control systems. Other safety issues occurred in other member states, most notably a dioxin contamination problem in Belgium (1999) linked to contaminated animal feed. There was a slow response from the authorities and a lack of records throughout the food chain to enable the detection and removal of suspect food - both in Belgium and in neighbouring countries where there were also contaminated products.

As a result of these issues, and with the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995 with its Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), it was recognised that the European Union needed to have a unified measure setting out more fundamental food law requirements and establishing systems for risk assessment and risk management. A White Paper on Food Safety was published by the Commission in 2000 and was quickly followed by a proposal for a general food law regulation. This was adopted quite rapidly and was published as Regulation 178/2002.

The Regulation provides

Under definitions, for the first time, the Regulation provided a definition of “food” for the purposes of all food law (see Article 2). In particular if defines the boundaries between “food” and other legislation. This is illustrated in this figure:

A larger version of this figure is available in pdf format: EU Definition of Food Figure

The Regulation provides a “top level” control and structure from which all other food law measures can be developed. Overall, the current food law system within the EU can be visualised as having the format illustrated in the figure:

A larger version of this figure is available in pdf format: EU Food Law Structure

For the Commission's page on this Regulation, see: General Food Law. For the European Food Safety Authority, see EFSA.

Regulation 178/2002

For the latest consolidated version, see: Regulation 178/2002 - Consolidated (July 2019)

UK Legislation

Before the adoption of EU Regulation 178/2002, the primary legislation for food was the Food Safety Act 1990. That Act remains important and it sets out many of the key legal processes for the effective application of food controls in England, Wales and Scotland - for Northern Ireland similar controls are contained in the Food Safety (Northern Ireland) Order 1991. The information below relates only to the application of the legal requirements introduced by Regulation 178/2002.

Brexit: Prior to the IP Completion Day (31 December 2020), the legal requirements given in the EU Regulation 178/2020 still applied to the UK. Since IP Completion Day, the Regulation 178/2002 has been incorporated into UK legislation but with amendments to correct deficiencies. Information on this is given below. For more details of the process of incorporating EU legislation into UK law, see the separate page: UK Food Law: EU Legislation as Amended for the UK. Provisions for the enforcement of the controls (originally the EU Regulations but now as amended) have been provided in the UK Regulations listed below. For Northern Ireland, EU rules still apply.

1 January 2021: For interim guidance, see:

EU Legislation with links to legislation.gov.uk: as amended for application in the UK:

Note that the amending Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2019/1381, was only to be applied in the EU from 27 March 2021.

Enforcement

As a key “high level” document, implementation of Regulation 178/2002 required an amendment to the Food Safety Act 1990 and, for Northern Ireland, the Food Safety (Northern Ireland) Order 1991, In particular, these incorporated the modified definition of “food”. Other aspects were implemented by adoption of “General Food Regulations”.

Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland)

Northern Ireland

Updating the Regulation (2018 - 2019)

As part of the general “Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme” (REFIT), the Commission undertook a “Fitness Check” of Regulation 178/2002 based on a mandate published in early 2014. The report on this “Refit Evaluation” was published in January 2018. In April 2018 the Commission published a proposal to make amendments to Regulation 178/2002. This forms the basis of discussions currently in progress on updating the Regulation. The Regulation was adopted by the Council in June 2019 and published in the Official Journal in September.

Key Documents

News items relating to the progress of this proposal:

The Adoption of Regulation 178/2002 (1999-2003)

The following are some of the stages in the process of adopting the Regulation:

Relevant news items on this site (1999-2003):

This page was first provided on 13 December 2018