EU Novel Food Eligibility Check: Reg. 2015/2283 Guide

How FMCG R&D and regulatory teams screen recipe ingredients against EU novel food logic, including what an unmatched ingredient does and does not mean.

Product development and regulatory teams in the EU often need an early read on whether a recipe ingredient is a novel food under Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 before they lock sourcing or artwork. Novel Food Eligibility Check screens a short ingredient list against a working set of catalogue determinations and reports violations, cleared items, and unknowns with explicit limits.

What the capability checks

For each ingredient string you pass, the capability:

  1. Normalises the name (lowercase, trim).
  2. Matches against its novel-food working set (name and synonyms): not authorised becomes a violation; authorised becomes cleared.
  3. Matches against a common-food list and clears those as ordinary foods.
  4. Leaves unmatched ingredients as unknown and lowers confidence.

It returns violations (with rule and severity), cleared items, unknowns, a confidence score, and whether review is required. An unknown is never treated as authorised.

Coverage limits that matter

The capability is labelled coverage=partial. The EU Novel Food Catalogue has hundreds of entries. An ingredient that is not matched here has not been checked against the full catalogue. That must never be read as “authorised” or as “ordinary food”.

The market scope is EU only: Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 and the EU Novel Food Catalogue. The US GRAS route and the UK novel food register are not read. An unmatched ingredient has been checked against this EU working set only.

How to use it in chat

Install fmcg.network in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or Cursor, then ask in your own words:

Check whether these ingredients are novel foods under EU rules: sugar, CBD, chia seeds.

A typical shape of answer: CBD as a high-severity violation when it matches the not-authorised set, sugar and chia cleared when they match authorised or common-food entries, confidence reflecting how many ingredients were known.

Is dragon fruit extract XYZ a novel food in the EU?

If the extract is not in the working set, expect unknown plus review_required. That is the honest outcome, not a guess.

What this is not

  • Not a full Union-list search across every catalogue entry.
  • Not a US or UK determination.
  • Not a compliance decision. The capability reports what its dataset knows and flags the rest for human review.

Open the capability page: Novel Food Eligibility Check.