NHFPC Have Published 429 National Food Safety Standards

Recently, on the 2014 Fifth Beijing International Sports Nutrition Food Forum, the deputy director from China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA) Mr. Yan Weixing revealed that the total number of national food safety standards (NFSS) published by NHFPC (previously MOH) has amounted to 429 as of the 17th of Nov 2014. The concept of NFSS system was firstly introduced in the existing Food Safety Law 2009 in order to standardize food safety in China. NHFPC was appointed to formulate and issue NFSS.

The old food standard system involves multiple food-related authorities such as NHFPC, AQSIQ and SAC as well as local governments who are all engaged in the compilation of standards in a separate or jointly way. This system has resulted in the problems of overlap, discrepancies and repetition between standards, which also causes troubles during regulators’ supervision and law enforcement. To improve the chaotic situation, NHFPC launched a national project in 2013 to optimize the regulatory system through cleaning up nearly 5000 existing food-related standards and also initiated the integration of the NFSS system from 2014. The priority of the large scale reform is to optimize food safety standards of edible agricultural products, food hygiene standards, food quality standards and related industrial standards. It is expected that the overhaul will be completed by the end of 2015.