About notification of food supplements, first thing to say is that most of EU countries require the notification of this kind of products before placing them into the market. So you can´t start selling food supplements until they are notified before the relevant sanitary authorities.

The first issue to bear in mind is that the company who will distribute these products (which is the one that must appear on the labels) must be a Food Business Operator with registered office at any county of the EU. If the FBO is from China or from the UK, it will be mandatory to have an “importer” of the products located in the EU.

There are 3 important steps to be considered about the notification of food supplements

• The label must be translated into the local language of the country where you want to sell and notification of food supplements.
• Secondly, it is absolutely mandatory to do the label check compliance according to the internal law of the country where you will sell your products. Each single country has its own regulation about ingredients, maximum levels of vitamins and minerals, mandatory warnings…etc.
• And finally, once the label is totally ok, we can start the process of notification. Again, each single country has its own process. In most EU countries the process of notification of food supplements works as a “responsible declaration” of the FBO which means that in the same moment of the notification you receive the “pre-market authorization” and you can start selling from that moment without waiting for any kind of authorization or approval from authorities. This is how it works in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Irland, Luxembuourgh, Germany…. However, in other countries like France or Belgium, this process takes longer because the authorities will check the content of the label before giving you the “Pre market authorization” (it can takes some weeks) but at the end, this doesn´t mean that this is an authorization or approval from authorities, because in all countries it will be the FBO the company responsible for the sale of the product and authorities will not assume any kind of responsability.