Current European regulatory trends and food contact testing requirements

In the last 20 years, the EU regulator has made significant changes to European food contact requirements. This has been in-part driven by public perception as well as by technical developments from research laboratories. Recently we have seen a growing trend for taking a non-targeted approach to testing food contact materials. This is often referred to as non-intentionally added substance (NIAS) testing. NIAS are chemical compounds that are present in a material but have not been added for a technical reason during the production process. They arise from break-down products of food contact materials, impurities of starting materials, unwanted side-products and various contaminants from recycling processes. Alongside NIAS, there is an increase in demand for the analysis of non-listed substances (NLS) such as inks, coatings and adhesives. These substances are not subject to formal EU risk assessment, but may have regulation in place at a national level. In order to sell products across Europe, analysis of these substances would need to be performed as part of a package of due diligence. Finally, we are seeing a shift in focus towards studying ultra-low levels of migration – which means that higher resolution equipment and unique testing methods are required to analyse this.

Upcoming changes to EU legislation

In 2018, the European Commission launched a consultation process to re-evaluate their existing regulatory Framework for food contact safety detailed in EU Regulation 1935/2004. This drew on expertise from national authorities in Europe, food contact experts, industry leaders and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

There were three main root causes explaining the perceived weaknesses of the current regulatory Framework:

• Insufficient resources are available for risk assessment, risk management and enforcement.
• An absence of consensus on the approach that should be followed to address any implementation gaps in the legislation.
• A lack of a regulatory mechanism to prioritize actions.