China NHFPC Reports the Progress of Food National Standards Consolidation

As part of the China Food Safety Publicity Week 2015, NHFPC held a press conference in the National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA) on 29 June to report the progresses made in developing national food standards, risk monitoring and safety evaluation. “Consolidating national food safety standards is currently the priority of the NHFPC’s work” according to Mr. Su Zhi from NHFPC. He also mentioned that the aim of cleaning up and integrating existing standards and compilation of new standards is to form a system that is more in line with codex standards and consistent with the current industry circumstances.

According to researcher Wang Zhutian from CFSA, problems of overlap, repetition and contradiction exist in many of China’s food standards (such as national standards, local standards, industrial standards, similar standards made by various departments), which has caused confusion for both industry and supervisory departments.

Through the joint efforts of more than 100 experts from various food sectors organized by NHFPC, the previous 4934 food standards that were formulated and issued in the last 30 years have been reduced to 1061. The huge project is expected to finish at the end of 2015.

The concept of NFSS was firstly introduced in the 2009 Food Safety Law. NHFPC was designated as the competent authority to formulate NFSS. The basic premise of the NFSS is to provide a gold standard reference database for both Chinese and international food industry and regulators to consult. So far there are 492 standards in total are released as national food safety standards.