EFSA’s new boss: Why faster risk assessments are my guiding light

If there’s one man who stands between a novel food and the world’s largest consumer market, it’s Dr Nikolaus Kriz.

As the newly appointed executive director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), his aim is to streamline food-tech innovators’ regulatory journey and unlock new ingredients for the bloc’s 440m consumers.

As befitting such lofty ambitions, Kriz’s workspace in Parma, Italy, where EFSA is headquartered, is imposing – a vast desk with a large EU flag behind him.

Contrary to this grand setting, he speaks with feeling about his remit, sharing his passion for science, animal health, and novel ingredients.

Faster risk assessments in particular are “my lighthouse”, he says, admitting that the need to speed up scientific evaluations is one of the things that keeps him up at night.

His biggest priority, he explains, is “to bring our risk assessment to all our stakeholders, for the ultimate benefit to consumers . . . without compromising our scientific excellence.”

Kriz believes that EFSA is “the safest food safety system in the world”. Maintaining this diligence, while accelerating approvals, requires science and innovation to take centre stage.

It is especially important that EFSA keeps pace with ongoing scientific innovation, he stresses. This is the only way to ensure that the food safety body continues to add value to European society.

Can novel foods get approved faster?

Long before he became EFSA’s executive director, Kriz worked for the European Medicines Agency, joining shortly after its foundation. Before this, he was an academic, teaching at the University of Glasgow.

Kriz speaks fondly of his long and varied career: varied in both location – he “has crossed many borders to be here” – and topic.

This extensive knowledge and experience has given him a deep appreciation of clinical trials and risk assessments, their necessity and the importance of stringency most of all.

EFSA has acknowledged that the organisation needs to work smarter and faster and has pledged to address this issue. Kriz has several ideas of his own.

Firstly, he believes one of the reasons novel food applications move so slowly is due to a lack of engagement between EFSA and food tech firms prior to the application itself.

“At EFSA, it is still the case that you could have an application tomorrow that the Commission or EFSA has not heard about. So it’s completely new.”

Kriz wants to change this. Such pre-submission partnerships would not only help EFSA itself be prepared, but would also be valuable to applicants themselves, many of which are SMEs.

SMEs often don’t have the experience or expertise in food safety applications that larger companies do. They would benefit especially from more, and more detailed, advice.

Kriz hopes to increase engagement between industry and regulators before submission and therefore make applications smoother for both.

Some of this is already going on: EFSA has increased pre-submission meetings by 47%, says Kriz.

He foresees future changes that might make the process even smoother. For example, legislation that gives EFSA more free rein to provide pre-submission applicants with greater technical and scientific advice could be a “real game changer”.

‘Premature’ applications can delay approvals

This leads to the second part of Kriz’s strategy – getting applications right first time.

Many are submitted without all the necessary data, meaning they are beset at every stage with additional requests for information from the Commission, or additional data requests from EFSA itself. Each time, this necessitates a clock stop, bogging down the process with inefficiency.

With a certain amount of weariness, Kriz explains how frustrating this eventuality can be – for all parties involved.

“Allow me to quote Martin Luther King,” he says. “‘I have a dream’. Imagine the dream of an application that is complete.”

Such an application would lead to a smoother process and a risk assessment that is conducted more efficiently.

Kriz is keen to draw on his experience with medicines, comparing applications in that area with those of novel food. As with medicines, submitting a novel food application prematurely can simply slow down the process, making it more difficult for both parties.

“Premature applications are like a premature baby,” says Kriz. You need to put it in the “incubator” of asking for more data and information. This inevitably prolongs the process.

The road to cultivated meat approval

For regulators like EFSA, cultivated meat is one of the new technologies requiring robust scrutiny. In other geographies – Singapore, Israel, and the US – it has already been approved. But Europe is lagging behind.

As Kriz points out, as a novel food, cultivated meat is “really novel”. And given the nascent nature of this sector, there are still many risks that must be explored.

Such risks include microbial contamination, residuals from the scaffolding, batch consistency, and even the potential for allergenicity, all of which are being investigated.

To date EFSA has only received a single application from a cultivated meat company – French firm Gourmey, which recently became Parima after a merger with fellow French start-up Vital Meat.

So will Europeans be eating cultivated chicken or foie gras any time soon?

Kriz is keen to stress the thorough nature of the risk assessment being conducted, but admits that he can’t predict as to when Europeans might see lab grown meat from the likes of Parima on the menu.

Fighting avian influenza

As well as tackling novel food applications, one of EFSA’s chief priorities is combatting plant and animal disease that could affect food and beverage.

It’s an area Kriz is familiar with, thanks to a senior role at EFSA overseeing animal health earlier in this career.

Kriz quickly lists the many plant and animal diseases and pests that pose a risk to the European food supply: from the Japanese beetle, which can cause yield loss in fruits and maize, to African swine fever, which can heavily impact pork production.

Before becoming director, Kriz pushed for EFSA to implement greater reporting requirements to each member state’s chief veterinary officer (CVO), whose role it is to prevent and tackle disease incursion.

Now, he is still backing increased data. The role of EFSA is to compile data from across the 27 member states – data on the progress of the disease in question, as well as where the susceptible animals are located – and share it with the CVOs. The ultimate decision on what to do with it still lies with the CVOs of the member states, but

“EFSA’s main value there is that they can give the CVOs information across borders.”

Avian influenza is a particularly relevant case. Over the course of 2025, the disease, also known as bird flu, has had a catastrophic effect on chicken populations, not just across EU member states but globally.

How member states deal with avian influenza varies, explains Kriz: while some vaccinate birds, many still use culling.

“Quick culling, when there are localised outbreaks and the main disease spread is in the wild bird population, is still the best way to deal with it.” Wild birds, of course, cannot be vaccinated; and with seasonal migrations they do not stay in one place either.

Nevertheless, he stresses that it’s best to work in prevention, rather than deal with such outbreaks as they come.

Informed by experience

Kriz may have a vast remit at EFSA, but his broad knowledge base and decades of engagement in the areas he is now tasked with leading have given him a combination of keen knowledge and strong personal investment in the role.

Despite his vast experience – or perhaps because of it – improving EFSA is more than just a bureaucratic task to Kriz. It is a labour of love.