CBD and Novel Foods in the UK

What a novel food is, and why CBD became one

A novel food, in UK and retained EU law, is a food that was not consumed to a significant degree within the relevant territory before 15 May 1997. The date is arbitrary in the way legal thresholds are: it is when the original European rules came into force, and anything with a demonstrable history of consumption before it is grandfathered in. Anything without one has to be assessed for safety before it can be sold as food.

CBD extracts fell on the wrong side of that line. Hemp has been eaten for a very long time, but concentrated cannabidiol extracts as a food ingredient have not, and in January 2019 the position was formalised: CBD extracts and isolates are novel foods and require authorisation. That was an uncomfortable announcement for a sector that had by then been trading openly for several years.

The consequence is the situation we are still in. A market already at scale was told that its central ingredient needed a safety dossier that essentially nobody had prepared, and rather than clear the shelves the regulator built a bridge. That bridge is the public list, and understanding it properly is most of understanding this subject.

One thing worth saying plainly at the outset, because it is the source of most confusion. This regime is entirely separate from the question of whether a CBD product is lawful to possess and supply. That question is answered by the Misuse of Drugs Regulations and the container rule. Novel foods is a food safety regime sitting on top of it, and a product can satisfy one and not the other.

The public list, and what it does not prove

The FSA published its public list in June 2022. It names CBD food products linked to an application the agency has validated, and its function is transitional: products on it have been permitted to remain available while their dossiers work through assessment, rather than being pulled from the market en masse.

The FSA's own wording is unambiguous and worth quoting, because the industry's use of the list frequently is not. Inclusion, the agency says, does not mean a product is authorised, only that the applicant is seeking authorisation. Products not on the list should be removed from the market.

Those are three different states, and the market talks as though there were one. A product can be authorised, which so far none is. It can be validated and awaiting a decision, which is where the compliant majority sit. Or it can be neither, which means it should not be there at all. If a shop describes its range as FSA approved, it is describing the second state using the language of the first, and the honest phrase for the second is on the public list.

The list is also not static, and that cuts both ways. Products have been added as applications progressed, and around a hundred were removed in one revision as some applicants advanced and others dropped out. A brand that was on the list two years ago is not necessarily on it now, and the only way to know is to look at the current version rather than at a screenshot in a blog post.

Geography matters here too, and almost nobody mentions it. The public list covers England and Wales. Scotland runs through Food Standards Scotland, which has moved in step with the FSA throughout. Northern Ireland, under the Windsor Framework arrangements, sits on the EU route, where CBD authorisation has its own separate and slower history. Describing the list as UK-wide is a small inaccuracy that becomes a real one if you are a business rather than a shopper.

Where authorisation has actually got to

Progress has been slow, and then in the last two years noticeably less slow. Safety assessment is the stage where the FSA's scientific advisers examine the dossier, and clearing it is a genuine milestone even though it is not the end.

The first two dossiers cleared safety assessment in 2024, and a further five have cleared since the start of 2025, which is a marked acceleration on what came before. Every product that has got this far is synthetic CBD or CBD isolate rather than a broad or full spectrum extract, which tells you something structural about the process: a single well-characterised molecule is a far easier thing to assess than a complex botanical mixture.

The decisive step came in August 2025, when the FSA opened a public consultation on authorising three CBD products as novel foods in Great Britain, described as synthetic cannabidiol, cannabidiol isolate, and isolated cannabidiol derived from hemp. The comment period closed on 20 November 2025 and the first authorisations are anticipated during 2026.

If those complete, Great Britain will have authorised CBD as a novel food for the first time, roughly seven years after declaring that it needed authorising. What that does to everything still sitting on the transitional list is the open question of the next couple of years, and we cover it below rather than pretending to know.

How the process works, and how long it has taken

The route from application to authorisation has four stages and no fixed clock, which is most of why this has taken as long as it has.

An application is first validated, meaning the FSA checks the dossier is complete enough to assess rather than checking whether the product is safe. Validation is what puts a product on the public list, and it is an administrative judgement rather than a scientific one. The dossier then goes to safety assessment, where the agency's scientific advisers examine the toxicology, the manufacturing process and the proposed intake. Clearing that stage is the substantive milestone. After it comes risk management, where the FSA and ministers consider what conditions of use should attach, followed by consultation and a decision.

Laid out against dates, the sequence explains the market's current shape better than any amount of argument about it. A deadline of 31 March 2021 was set for products already being sold to have an application in, which is the reason the compliant market is essentially closed to newcomers: a brand launching a new ingestible today is not in the same position as one that filed five years ago.

The gaps in that timeline are the story. Two years passed between the deadline and the first list, another two before any dossier cleared safety assessment, and the whole thing has moved faster since 2024 than in the five years before it. Reading the sector as either lawless or settled misses that it has been slowly grinding through a queue.

Three numbers, and why they keep being confused

This is the part where the subject gets genuinely muddled, including in places that ought to know better, and it is where a reader can most easily be misled by something that is not technically false.

UK CBD now carries three official numbers. The first is legal: no more than 1mg of controlled cannabinoids in the container, from the exempt product provision in the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001. That one decides whether a product may be sold at all, it is measured per container regardless of size, and it applies to every format including vapes and balms.

The second is advisory and about CBD: the FSA's provisional acceptable daily intake of 10mg a day for healthy adults, set in October 2023 in place of an earlier figure of 70mg. The agency expresses it as 0.15mg per kilogram of bodyweight per day, which is where the 10mg comes from for an adult of 70kg. It is guidance, it is per day rather than per container, and it covers CBD from food only.

The third is the newest and the least reported. In July 2025 the FSA updated its guidance following a joint position paper from its Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes and the Committee on Toxicity, which recommended a safe upper limit for delta-9 THC in hemp-derived novel foods of 0.07mg a day, equivalent to one microgram per kilogram of bodyweight per day for a 70kg adult. It prompted a round of reformulation across the sector, and it is almost invisible in consumer-facing writing.

Now put the first and third side by side, because the comparison is startling and we have not seen anyone make it. A container sitting exactly at the legal ceiling holds 1mg of controlled cannabinoids. The health-based upper limit for delta-9 THC is 0.07mg a day. One divided by the other is a little over fourteen, so a product at the legal maximum holds roughly a fortnight's worth of the advisory figure. Both numbers are current, both are official, and both concern THC. They differ by that much because they answer entirely different questions: one asks whether a pack is a controlled drug, the other asks what a person should consume in a day.

Neither number is wrong, and neither cancels the other. But a seller quoting whichever is more convenient, without saying which question it answers, is doing the same thing the industry did for a decade with the hemp cultivation percentage. We would rather name the pattern now than write the corrective article in three years.

Which formats novel foods actually reaches

Novel foods is food law, which sounds obvious and yet is where a surprising number of claims come apart. The regime covers what you consume, and it does not extend by analogy to anything else.

Oils taken by mouth, capsules, gummies, sweets, chocolate, honey, drinks and anything else swallowed are in scope, whatever their spectrum. Vapes are not, because inhaling is not eating; they sit under tobacco-related product rules instead. Balms, creams and other topicals are not, because applying to skin is not eating; they sit under cosmetics rules. Hemp papers and accessories are not.

Hemp seed oil and hulled hemp seed are a different case again, and the reason is worth knowing. They are outside novel foods not because of the format but because they have a genuine history of consumption before 1997, so they were never novel in the first place. That is why a hemp food aisle can exist untroubled while a CBD oil next to it carries a whole regulatory apparatus.

The practical upshot for a shopper is a short rule. If a seller claims Novel Foods authorisation for a vape or a balm, they have misunderstood their own product category, and that is worth more than it sounds, because the same carelessness tends to show up in the laboratory documentation you cannot see. Equally, the absence of a Novel Foods position on a vape is not a red flag. It is correct.

Reconciling two statements that look contradictory

One of the better UK guidance sources on this subject, written for Trading Standards audiences, states on the same page that a product containing THC at any detectable level is a controlled drug, and that a compliant product contains less than 1mg of THC. Read quickly, those cancel out. Read properly, they are both correct and the mechanism between them is the thing worth understanding.

THC is a controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and there is no threshold in that Act below which it stops being one. That is the first statement, and it is why detectable THC in a product is not a trivial matter.

What rescues the product is not a threshold in the Act but an exemption in the Regulations. The exempt product provision in the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 carves out preparations that satisfy three conditions at once: they are not designed for administering a controlled drug, the controlled drug cannot readily be recovered from them, and no single component part holds more than one milligram of it. Satisfy all three and the preparation is exempt from control. Fail any one and you are back to the first statement.

So the 1mg figure is not a permitted level of THC. It is one condition of an exemption from a prohibition that otherwise has no lower bound. That is a meaningfully different thing, and it explains why full spectrum products need such careful handling and why CBD flower fails despite trace-level readings.

What this means when you are actually buying something

Compressed into something usable, and applicable to us as much as to anyone else.

For anything you swallow, the reasonable question is whether the product sits on the FSA public list, and the honest answer for most of the market is yes, validated and awaiting a decision. Accept that answer. Do not accept approved, authorised or FSA certified, because at the time of writing nothing holds that status and any brand using those words is either confused or hoping you are.

Look at the label for an intake reference. The FSA asked businesses to display the acceptable daily intake and key safety information, so a pack that mentions 10mg a day is one whose maker has read the guidance since 2023. A pack silently built around a serving several times that has not been revisited in a while.

For vapes and topicals, ignore novel foods entirely and check the container rule and the certificate instead. Different regime, different question.

And the honest caution, since this article is otherwise about a process rather than a purchase: none of this tells you a product is good. Authorisation is a safety assessment, not a quality mark, and a validated dossier says nothing about whether the specific batch in your hand matches its own label. That question is answered by a certificate of analysis, which is why we think learning to read one matters more than any badge a shop can put on a homepage.

What is genuinely unsettled

More of this subject is open than closed, and a page that ends with tidy reassurance would be misleading.

The largest unknown is what happens to the transitional arrangement when authorisations begin. A public list that keeps a validated but unauthorised market trading is by definition temporary. Once the first authorisations land, the FSA will have to decide what becomes of everything still queued behind them, and there is no published endgame. Businesses in the sector do not know, and anyone telling you they do is guessing.

The second is what happens to full spectrum and broad spectrum extracts. Every dossier that has cleared safety assessment so far is synthetic CBD or isolate, which are simple, well-characterised substances. A whole-plant extract is a far harder assessment, and whether the process ultimately accommodates one is not yet demonstrated either way.

The third is the advisory figures themselves. The CBD intake number has already moved once, by a factor of seven, and the THC upper limit is new as of July 2025 and described as a safe upper limit rather than a settled standard. Provisional means provisional.

And the fourth sits outside novel foods altogether. Semi-synthetic cannabinoids such as H4CBD are not covered by any of this. They hold no authorisation, no dossier and no place on the list, because they are not what the regime was written about. We stock a small number of such lines on an explicit decision by the owner, and we label them for what they are rather than letting the general fog around CBD regulation do the work. This page was last checked in July 2026.