The Food Standards Agency (FSA) Board has given the go-ahead for new regulatory proposals to enter their next stage of planning.
Under the Future of Food Regulation programme, the proposals look to reform the entire system, modernising a regulatory framework that has not been changed in decades.
What will change?
The changes include the strengthening of local authority food teams, a more consistent national approach to scrutinise the very largest food businesses, and more transparency around food hygiene.
Plans to be designed in further detail include:
- How to support and strengthen local expertise by giving local authority food teams the tools they need to act on problems and support the businesses in their communities
- Improving the way food businesses register from the outset, so there is a clearer picture of who is operating in the food system
- While local authorities will regulate and support businesses in their communities, national oversight will focus on a handful of the very largest businesses
- Making better use of data and intelligence from across large businesses’ supply chains
- Giving clearer, more consistent guidance to businesses
- Being more open about food hygiene, including making it compulsory to display food hygiene ratings online across the UK, and in shops and restaurants in England.
Why the change?
Explaining the reasoning behind the proposals, chair of the FSA, Professor Susan Jebb, said: “The system that protects our food has served us well for many years, maintaining some of the highest food standards in the world.
“But the way people buy, sell and produce food has changed enormously, and we need to keep pace with that change so that we can be confident of continuing to keep food safe into the future.”
The proposals follow a request outlined in the Autumn 2025 Budget, which saw the government ask the FSA to design a plan for a national system of regulation for large food businesses in England, starting with retailers.
This because supermarkets have a huge reach with consumers and considerable influence with their supply chain. While the vast majority of food businesses (more than 99.5%) are micro, small and medium businesses, more than 97% of food sold in shops comes from just ten national retailers.
This saw the FSA launch a pilot programme which uses a data-led approach to regulate these supermarkets. The trial found that a national level scrutiny of their data could be used to identify food safety issues and risks at a systemic level, alongside checks on the ground.
“The idea was not to replace the food role of local authorities, but rather to help local authorities make better use of their stretched resources,” explained Chris McGarvey, Director in Regulatory & Compliance at Walker Morris, who previously led the FSA’s legal team.
“By combining a supermarket’s own enterprise-level safety and compliance data with local information, the FSA could help assess the overall risk posed by that retailer, which should reduce the need for local, premises-based inspections.
“This was something new for the FSA and for the big retailers who took part in the pilot exercise. Among other things, the pilot underlined the fact that a food regulatory system designed for the 20th century was failing to make use of data generated by sophisticated food businesses whose focus and challenges are firmly those of ‘the 2020s’.”
The big challenge
Once the FSA has tested its proposed new front-line role with big food retailers, it will consider how that approach might apply to ‘other sectors’, including manufacturers.
But none of this will be without complications. There has already been controversy around the rationale for the ‘triaged regulatory pathway’ for large businesses given the perceived lower risk presented by their retail operations.
“The FSA will want to look ‘under-the-hood’ to assess risk, which won’t always be comfortable for the businesses concerned,” McGarvey told Food Manufacture.
“A further complication is that any holding of food business data by the FSA could attract freedom of information (FOI) requests, leading to its disclosure to the public at large. There are some exemptions under FOI legislation that might prevent disclosure, but there is no guarantee they will always apply.”
McGarvey also raised concerns that the data, which is likely to be technical and system-specific, may be difficult for FSA inspectors to interpret properly.
“It is difficult to see how there will be a direct read-across here, because manufacturing introduces an additional layer of compliance and data complexity that doesn’t always exist for retailers,” he said.
“Depending on how data is shared, the complexity of exception reporting in modern production systems might lead to many ‘false positives’ where the FSA thinks there is a safety problem, when in fact all that is being flagged is an efficiency or other commercial marker, unrelated to safety or labelling.
“One advantage for food manufacturers of being in a later phase of the Programme is that the FSA may, by then, have developed a better feel for enterprise-level data analysis and interrogation of large datasets. ”
Louise Grinyer, head of food safety and membership at Leatherhead Food Research also shared concerns: “Large food businesses already generate a lot of information through audits, supplier assurance programmes, testing, complaints and internal monitoring.
“Deciding which information is meaningful, bringing it together in a consistent way and using it to identify emerging or systemic risks – without creating duplication or unnecessary reporting burdens – could be a significant challenge.”
What should manufacturers do now?
The FSA is now working with local authority food teams, businesses and other partners through a technical advisory committee. This group will help develop the approach and work through the detail of each change as part of a system-wide regulatory model.
The Board will then review the updates in March 2027 with a public consultation to follow.
For Grinyer, the advice to manufacturers is to watch the programme closely.
“While the proposals are unlikely to result in immediate change, they signal a wider move towards more intelligence-led and risk-based regulation, with greater emphasis on understanding risks across businesses and supply chains,” she added.
McGarvey agreed: “Keep an eye on FSA announcements about progress with the programme.
“Look afresh at your internal compliance data, perhaps with a non-expert, to see how easy it is for an external reviewer to understand; and consider whether system reports can be adapted/redacted so that they can be shared externally.”
He also advised to keep up good relations with premises-level local authority environmental health and trading standards officers.
“They are not going anywhere soon and may even get more powers to intervene at the site level.”