How to keep up to date with Food Legislation?

Does anyone have any guidance on the most efficient way of understanding current legislation.

Its mainly when changes are made to legislation how can i be informed and ensure that if it affects anything relevant to the business i can action accordingly.

Murae

Murae,

The FDA does email alerts for changes that they make to policy or other news that they come out with.  it is as easy as setting up an email and checking the boxes on the alerts that you want to receive.

https://www.fda.gov/...tes/default.htm

In the UK you can subscribe to the Food Standards Agency here:

https://www.food.gov.uk/news-alerts

Cheers!

Hi Murae,
If it's just a case of keeping on top of new developments then you may find it useful to join a trade association for your sector - these will (or certainly should, IMO ;) ) send out updates on changes that affect members, and it should potentially also give you the opportunity to review draft proposals and provide feedback to engage in consultation on new regs.

For some specific areas you can also register for updates/newsletters from the regulators, so for example you can subscribe to the newsletter updates for the FSA's Regulating Our Future review program here: https://www.food.gov...ture-newsletter

For the EU stuff you can also subscribe to EFSA's highlights and/or daily alerts emails here: https://europa.us10....4&id=7ea646dd1d

Leatherhead also runs an "annual regulatory update" day that reviews recent and forthcoming changes, but it may be a bit too post factum for those changes that have already entered into force, unless you're already aware of them from elsewhere.

pHruit,

These are good ones.  Did not know about the Europa one.  Thanks!

Dear Murae,

It might be a good idea to create a separate folder in your system where you store all legislation you find. You can add subfolders per country or some with the important legislation topics.

Furthermore you can create an Excel sheet as a register with the interesting links toward the usefull sources, mentioned above by the other members. You will see that within a short period of time you will build a nice legislation database. It allows you also to quickly find the information you're looking for, in case of requests.

Kind regards,

Gerard Heerkens

Thanks for the suggestions guys, Brendon and pHruit the links are a great help.

I'm just having a little difficulty in understanding when a legislation has been updated, information transferred into another legislation or a new legislation created that covers the original information.

Hi Murae,
You can find that within the legislation itself. For the EU stuff it'll be in the first section below the title/reference - if it's "amending regulation/directive..." then it's an update to that regulation/directive (i.e. all of the content of the original is still in place, except for the specific bits added/changed/removed by the amending article), whereas if it is "repealing regulation/directive..." then the things it is repealing cease to be in force and the new one takes over.

For example, everyone's favourite Food information to Consumers labelling regulation has the incredibly catchy full title of: Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2011 on the provision of food information to consumers, amending Regulations (EC) No 1924/2006 and (EC) No 1925/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council, and repealing Commission Directive 87/250/EEC, Council Directive 90/496/EEC, Commission Directive 1999/10/EC, Directive 2000/13/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, Commission Directives 2002/67/EC and 2008/5/EC and Commission Regulation (EC) No 608/2004

In this case it is amending Regulations (EC) 1924/2006 (nutrition and health claims) and (EC) 1925/2006 (addition of vitamins and minerals and similar to foods), so both of these regulations are still in force but are modified slightly by the new labelling reg.

It also repeals Directives 87/250/EEC (indication of alcoholic strength labelling), 90/496/EEC (nutrition labelling for foodstuffs), 1999/10/EC (nutrition labelling, amending an earlier directive), 2000/13/EC (labelling, presentation and advertising of foods), 2002/67/EC (labelling of foods containing quinine and caffeine) and 2008/5/EC (some extra labelling requirements not included in previous directives), and regulation (EC) 608/2004 (extra labelling requirements for phytosterols etc). In effect, the function of all of these has been combined and updated into the single new regulation.

There are of course also implications at a national level for EU member states, as the EU bits will be entered into local law via statutory instruments so you'd need to review those in parallel.  

For the above example you'd want to look at The Food Information Regulations 2014 (SI 2014 No. 1855). Alas here in the UK it isn't laid out with a nice summary of repealed/amended acts at the top, so you'd need to look at either the table of contents (most UK regs on legislation.gov.uk have one) or the citation section (usually the first bit) to find out where you actually need to go to check. In the case of this example it turns out that Schedule 6 contains a table of revocations with details of whether this is the whole act or specific parts only.

That felt like it was a rather long-winded way of explaining things, but alas it isn't the simplest of areas.

Again using a trade association could help, as they should draw your attention to changes that are particularly relevant to your sector(s).