Dear Mr Barroso,

Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation: Impact on the European Food and Food Supplements Industries.

The undersigned group of concerned companies are writing to you to ask for your personal intervention in the current application of Articles 13.1 and 13.3 of the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation.

We believe that the planned piecemeal approach to the adoption of the Community lists of Article 13.1 “permitted” and “prohibited” health claims, distorts competition in the market and will have a potentially devastating impact on industry.

The Member States submitted the claims for validation to the European Commission, which passed them on to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for their evaluation and opinion.

Procedurally, it was understood that the Commission would regulate on EFSA’s opinions at one time, by 31st January 2010, as stipulated in the Regulation. However, this deadline has slipped.

EFSA will not deliver all of its opinions at the same time, despite the DG SANCO Director General’s call last July that opinions should not be published in a batch-wise fashion. Subsequently, DG SANCO has decided to proceed with the piecemeal adoption of EFSA’s opinions through until 2011.

We call upon you to intervene and stop this piecemeal approach, which:

• Distorts competition in the market, giving a competitive advantage to those companies who have received positive opinions on claims from EFSA and are free to market their claims across Europe, over those companies that await EFSA’s opinion for claims that are only authorised in some national markets.
• Creates unnecessary and disproportionate costs for manufacturers due to successive label changes as they await the opinions for each claim for the ingredients in their products, which are decided upon in batches at different times. This entails huge costs with the greatest impact on SMEs.
• Creates confusion in the market as non-harmonised claims co-exist with harmonised claims for a period of up to two years with unequal conditions of access to markets across the EU.

We call for all EFSA opinions to be delivered before any further steps are taken towards a formal decision on the final list of “permitted” Article 13.1 health claims.

Yours Sincerely,

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