The long-term future of Britain’s CBD sector ‘really will lie with EU authorisations’, the chair of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has told its board, a candid admission that the domestic regime the industry has chased for six years may ultimately be superseded by Brussels.
In a cruel irony for the CBD operators who have invested more than five years working through the often labyrinthine novel foods approval process in the UK, the concession came in the very same meeting that the FSA’s board agreed to recommend the first three CBD applications for authorisation by ministers.
Producers have already been forced to conform to a much lower 10mg acceptable daily intake (ADI) imposed mid-process, a shift that drove many applicants to abandon the process or reformulate. Alignment with Brussels would demand a second, far steeper cut.
On September 18 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published its first positive safety opinion on a CBD novel food, judging it ‘safe at intake levels up to 2 mg/day’ for adults.
One step forward, a giant leap back
As Business of Cannabis reported earlier this month, on September 03, the FSA published a board paper suggesting it would ‘recommend’ it advises ‘Ministers in England and Wales to authorise the three high-purity CBD novel foods’.
On September 16, during the FSA’s board meeting in Swansea, members agreed to put these three applications forward to ministers for final approval.
The board’s CBD discussion begins at around 1h 29m.
These include the synthetic CBD of Chanelle McCoy (RP7), Cannaray’s isolate (RP350) and the EIHA isolate (RP427), together linked to roughly 3,000 products on the FSA’s public list.
Chair Professor Susan Jebb described the applications as ‘first-in-class’, noting the products ‘have not been authorised anywhere in the world’, making this ‘a significant milestone’ for the CBD industry, regulator, and country.
Yet in the same breath she made it clear that this milestone was likely to be fleeting. She noted that the process had been ongoing since before she became chair and had been ‘complicated’ by the EU-UK SPS negotiations, which require alignment with the EU on food safety.
“But at this stage, we are continuing to progress these CBD foods towards authorisation,” she said.
“The long-term future for this sector really will lie with EU authorisations. But I think the risk-management decisions that we make, or the recommendations we make to ministers, will be scrutinised by other countries, and have the potential to shape future decisions elsewhere.”
Under the proposed SPS agreement, Great Britain would ‘dynamically align’ with EU rules in SPS areas ‘including market authorisations’, automatically adopting Brussels’ regime rather than running its own.
The agency’s SPS programme paper, put to the same September board meeting, states plainly that ‘from the date the Agreement comes into force, all the GB authorisations cease to apply, and businesses would require an EU authorisation to place regulated products on the market in GB’.
Only ‘some very limited exceptions to dynamic alignment may apply’, it adds, without saying whether CBD would be among them.
The agreement is not yet signed, and a UK-EU summit due in July was postponed ‘due to the changes in Government over the summer’, though the FSA says negotiations remain ‘at an advanced stage and will conclude as soon as possible’, and the agency is ‘actively preparing for implementation… in summer 2027’.
As such, the SPS agreement is not yet a formality but is widely expected to proceed, not least, by the FSA.
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What EU control would look like
Following years of inaction from EFSA, which put CBD evaluations on hold in 2022 citing the need for more scientific data, it is now actively moving ahead.
On September 18 the European Food Safety Authority published its first positive opinion on a CBD novel food, for the same synthetic CBD from Chanelle McCoy, concluding it is ‘safe at intake levels up to 2 mg/day under the proposed conditions of use, except for people taking medication’.
EFSA’s opinion itself records that the FSA and FSS had ‘positively concluded on the safety of the NF matter of this opinion’ at 10mg. McCoy, whose UK and EU applications run in parallel, had originally sought 25mg in Europe before cutting the request to match EFSA’s provisional level.
In a second EFSA opinion assessing a CBD isolate from the US firm CBD Industries (cleared in the UK as RP793 at 10mg) the panel reached the opposite conclusion.
It said that ‘the safety of the NF under the proposed conditions of use cannot be established’. On two products Britain has judged safe at 10mg, Europe has landed at 2mg and at no.
The domestic steer
For now, the FSA is pressing on under the current framework, and its board used the meeting to toughen the terms. Officials had argued that warning labels were a proportionate response to concerns about under-18s, the board was ‘not quite persuaded’.
Drawing comparisons with the belated regulation of vapes, Jebb told officials to set out stronger options, up to age-of-sale restrictions, for ministers rather than defaulting to labelling, and asked for a post-market surveillance plan to be ‘in place and robust’ before the authorisations proceed.
Thomas Vincent, the FSA’s deputy director for innovation, said a legislative ban had been weighed with the Department of Health and Social Care but judged disproportionate ‘to the evidence of harm’ for now.
He also signalled that future CBD cases would not return to the board, becoming ‘a much more routine item’ handled by the executive.
The decisions now rest elsewhere. The European Commission must decide whether to authorise the McCoy ingredient. Ministers in England, Scotland and Wales must rule on the FSA’s recommendations.
Meanwhile, the SPS talks must settle whether any of it survives alignment.
