port, the number of approved health claims in Europe is extremely low with only 254 out of 2,242 health claims being approved by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) up until March 2014.This high standard has made Europe a hard market for some manufacturers, while at the same time providing a gold standard test for health claims. In contrast, Japan’s FOSHU system has lass strict demands for clinical evidence, making Japan a popular test market for new ingredients.
By early 2014, total approvals in Japan reached over 1,100 – almost five times the number of approvals in Europe.
The report highlights that an area with significant number of claims is that of probiotics which boasts benefits such as digestive health and immune support. Canadean says that underlying clinical evidence is seen as too poor to get the approval in EU, whereas Japan has approved probiotics as functional foods, resulting in a host of new probiotic-enhanced food products.
According to Canadean analyst, Ronan Stafford, Japan is the centre of functional innovation: “Both in terms of the regulatory attitude towards approval of novel ingredients but also in the willingness of consumers to embrace new and unusual functional ingredients.”
Canadean says that at present, the country with the highest consumption of functional food and drink products is the US and that countries such as China, India and Brazil stand to “exert significant influence” over the functional food and drinks market in the future.
The reports states that the future of the functional food sector is hard to predict, with large emerging markets such as India, China and Brazil most likely adopting stricter regulation in relation to health claims.
The second key future event is the ‘rump’ of approvals in Europe – particularly the possibility of approval for probiotic health claims. “Clinical trials evidence has lagged EFSA’s approvals process by 6-10 years so within the next five years we should see more definitive outcomes on a range of ingredients,” says Stafford.
