How can I ensure my new food product is safe and compliant?

This blog covers everything you need to know about new food product safety, compliance and testing before going to market in the UK. 

You’ve developed a new food product you believe in. You’ve refined the recipe, found a manufacturer and started thinking about your brand and packaging.  

The launch feels close. 

Then, someone mentions HACCP, SALSA compliance or Natasha’s Law, and suddenly the ground shifts a little.

Getting food safety compliance wrong can carry huge consequences for your food business. We’ve written this blog to help you understand your safety and compliance obligations for your new food product.

Understanding the regulatory landscape in the UK

Food Standards Act 1999 established the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the regulatory body charged with protecting public health in relation to food. It gives the FSA the power to act in consumers’ interests at any point in the food production and supply chain.

Meanwhile, the Food Safety Act 1990 provides the framework for all food legislation in England, Scotland and Wales. It places a legal obligation on all food businesses to ensure they produce and sell food that’s safe to consume, accurately labelled and meets consumer expectations. 

The EU’s Regulation (EC) 178/2002, now assimilated into UK law, sets out our General Food Law principles, including traceability requirements, the duty to withdraw unsafe products and the obligation to notify authorities of food safety risks.

While the UK is no longer bound by the EU’s food regulations in the way it once was, Brexit didn’t wipe the slate clean. A significant body of EU regulation was carried over. So, food businesses in the UK still need to work to rules that are closely aligned with what came before.

The UK also has its own regulatory bodies, with the FSA covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) covering Scotland. Both have the legal authority to amend and enforce regulations independently of the EU.

Building your HACCP plan

A properly implemented Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan is fundamental to ensuring food safety compliance in the UK. It’s a legal requirement for all food businesses, and it needs to be specific to your products, processes and premises.

The logic behind HACCP is systematic and preventive. Rather than testing your finished product and hoping for the best, HACCP requires you to work through every stage of your production process to identify where any potential hazards could arise. 

For each hazard, you must identify the specific steps, known as critical control points (CCPs), in your process where those hazards can be controlled. For each CCP, you must then set a critical limit, a monitoring procedure and a corrective action for when something falls outside the acceptable parameters. 

For your new food product, this means working through your HACCP plan from scratch. It needs to reflect your specific ingredients, process steps and production environment. It also needs to be documented, kept up to date and reviewed whenever your product or process changes.

If you’re unsure where to start, check out our ‘What should a food safety management system include?’ blog, which contains a run-down of the seven principles of HACCP and what to include in your plan. 

Food testing

Food testing is probably the area that gives new food product developers the most anxiety. However, it becomes less stressful once you understand what each type of testing is for.  

Microbiological testing assesses whether your product is free from pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria Monocytogenes and E. coli. It also monitors the indicators that tell you whether your process is under control. 

Shelf-life testing helps you establish and justify the use-by or best-before date on your product. It involves storing your product under required conditions and testing at defined intervals for microbiological activity, quality and, sometimes, chemical markers. 

If your product is designed to inhibit bacterial growth, either through pH, low water activity, preservatives or modified packaging, challenge testing validates that those controls work in practice. It’s especially relevant for chilled products with an extended shelf life.

Nutritional analysis supports your mandatory food labelling obligations. And allergen testing verifies that your contamination controls are working. For example, if you produce a nut-free product in a facility that also handles nuts, periodic swab and product testing will provide evidence that your cleaning and separation procedures are effective.

Food labelling

Labelling failures are one of the most common causes of food recalls in the UK. Many of these incidents come down to labelling errors made because the producer didn’t fully understand the rules before they went to market.  

The mandatory information required on most prepacked food sold in the UK includes: 

• Name of the food

• Full ingredients list

• Allergen declaration

• Best-before or use-by date

• Storage instructions

• Name and address of the food business operator 

• Net quantity

• Back-of-pack nutritional breakdown

Your nutritional declarations must cover energy (in both kJ and kcal), fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt, all expressed per 100g or 100ml. 

Nutrition and health claims are also tightly regulated. Only those listed in the Great Britain Nutrition and Health Claims Register can be used, and each carries a specific, legally defined threshold. You can’t describe a product as ‘low fat’, for example, unless it contains no more than 3g of fat per 100g.

Natasha’s Law, introduced in October 2021, extended full ingredient and allergen labelling requirements to all food products packaged on the same premises as they’re sold. Under the law, you must emphasise the 14 declarable allergens (gluten, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame, soya, celery, lupin, mustard and sulphites) within your ingredients list. 

However, precautionary allergen labelling (‘This product may contain…’) is voluntary. You should use it only where your HACCP assessment has identified a genuine risk of cross-contamination.

Finally, if your product falls into the high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) category, it has implications for how you can market it. Paid-for online advertising for less healthy food and drink products has been banned completely, with pre-watershed TV advertising restrictions also in place. 

Traceability and supply chain

UK food law requires all food businesses to be able to trace their products one step back and one step forward in the supply chain. So, you’ll need to be able to evidence who supplied your ingredients and where your finished products went. 

In practice, that means keeping robust records of your ingredient suppliers, the lots and batches you’ve purchased, and the customers or distributors you’ve supplied. If a safety issue arises, either with your product or with an ingredient your supplier has used, you need to be able to act quickly and precisely.

If you’re targeting the retail or foodservice markets, buyers often have their own supplier approval requirements. Many major UK retailers require BRCGS certification or a recognised equivalent. That may feel distant for your early-stage product launch, but understanding what’s required and beginning to build toward it is worth doing early.

Registering your food business

You must register your food business with your local authority at least 28 days before you start trading. Registration is usually free. It puts your business on your local authority’s inspection radar and determines the frequency of your routine food hygiene inspections. 

Your hygiene rating, published under the FSA’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, is visible to consumers and is increasingly requested by retail and foodservice buyers. 

If your business is involved in higher-risk production, such as meat or dairy products, you may also need formal approval from your local authority before starting production, which is a more extensive process than standard registration.

Where to start

Here’s a practical checklist for approaching safety and compliance for your new food product:

1. Register your food business with your local authority if you haven’t already.

2. Check whether any of your ingredients require pre-market authorisation. You should do this before any serious investment in production or packaging, because it can change or delay your product launch.

3. Build your HACCP plan before you finalise your production process, as making any changes retrospectively can be harder and more expensive.

4. Design and commission your testing programme early. Shelf-life studies take time. Starting them late means either delaying your launch or bringing a product to market with a shorter shelf life than you planned.

5. Develop your labelling alongside your product formulation. Get your allergen matrix right, understand your nutritional profile and confirm that any claims you want to make are legal and compliant before you commission any artwork.

6. Put your traceability and supplier assurance systems in place before your first production run.

How can Beacon Compliance help?

For food businesses without an in-house technical or regulatory team, working through all the above steps while simultaneously developing a product, sourcing ingredients, manufacturing and building a market can be a significant undertaking.

That’s where Beacon Compliance can help. Our expert team of food safety consultants brings more than 80 years’ combined industry experience working with food businesses at every stage of growth, from first-time product developers to globally recognised brands. We know where the hidden pitfalls sit and how to help you avoid them.

So, if you’re launching a new food product in the UK and want to make sure you’ve covered the essentials that matter, get in touch to book a free, no-obligation consultation.