Legislation

The food industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and as it affects the health and wellbeing of so many people and animals, the industry is heavily legislated. All parties that handle food and feed in anyway are responsible for keeping up to date with food law.

As the industry becomes more globalised, food legislation has had to evolve to regulate food safety among nations in the world. Large institutions such as the FAO and WHO are responsible setting global standards.

The overall objectives for developing national food laws are:

1. To provide a high level of health protection for consumers.
2. States have an obligation to ensure that only safe food and feed are placed on the market.
3. Where appropriate, animal health and welfare, protection of environment, and plant life should be taken care of.

In the EU, food legislation is based around a framework set out in the general Food law (EC 2002).

The aim of the general Food law is to protect public health and consumers’ interest in relation to food. The regulation applies to all stages of production, processing and distribution of food and feed with the exception of domestic activities.

In addition, this regulation also defines the structure and tasks of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The general food law also provides general principles of food law, such as:

• Food law shall be based on risk analysis where possible.

• Precautionary principle: Where after risk, an uncertainty persists, provisional risk management measures may be taken to ensure a high level of health protection, until more scientific information is available.

• Consumers’ interests will be protected.

To attain this, the most important principle is that there will be no food or feed placed on the market which is unsafe.

All food operators are responsible for their part of the food chain, to achieve this operators are to be accountable for the legislation surveillance of their activity.

With more than thousand of legislation pieces relating to food & feed keeping up to date with changes in such a rapidly evolving industry can prove daunting, especially as the consequences of missing important changes can be severe.

The ALS Solutions Legislation service keeps track of all changes to the most important pieces of regulation and legislation ensuring that the information that we provide is always the most up to date. The service we provide tracks major changes across the UK, EU and the USA.

Legislation can often be difficult to understand and interpret, that is why guidance notes from industry regulatory bodies are often released to assist with this. However, most supplementary documents are rarely publicised and many industry personnel are not aware of their existence when they are released.

With ALS Solutions we actively look for new guidance notes from across the industry to ensure that our clients are well informed, allowing them to make better decisions.

The huge variety of goods and materials handled by the food Industry means that there are thousands of specific legislations covering the fine details of almost every food and feed product. Finding the correct, most up to date version is a time-consuming task.

ALS are able to save and maintain any specific regulations that clients may need. All documents are stored on ALS Solutions Legislation module allowing clients to search the database and access the documentation they are looking for at any time.

Clients can also be notified of any updates or changes in the current legislation they are following.

In combination with the Horizon Scanning solution, the legislation module ensures clients are kept informed without having the burden to maintain their own surveillance process.