IN Brief:
- The UK government intends the UK–EU SPS agreement to take effect in mid-2027, subject to negotiations.
- Food, feed, and drink businesses are within scope even where they do not trade directly with the EU.
- Areas affected include food law, hygiene, additives, contaminants, marketing standards, labelling, and food contact materials.
Defra has urged agri-food businesses to prepare for the planned UK–EU sanitary and phytosanitary agreement, with the government aiming for the new arrangements to take effect in mid-2027.
The proposed agreement would create a closer regulatory framework for the trade and movement of plants, animals, animal products, food, and feed between the UK and the EU. It is intended to reduce paperwork, remove routine SPS border checks for many goods, and make movement between Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and the EU more predictable.
Food, feed, and drink manufacturers fall within a broad scope. Hygiene rules, general food law, additives, pesticide maximum residue levels, marketing standards, labelling, and food contact materials are all expected to be affected. The agreement also covers consumer information, food and feed contaminants, novel foods, supplements, organics, mineral waters, irradiation, feed hygiene, plant health, animal health, and veterinary medicine residue limits.
Companies selling only in the domestic UK market may still need to prepare where products, ingredients, packaging, or production systems intersect with aligned rules. The agreement therefore extends beyond exporters and hauliers, reaching into specifications, recipes, supplier documentation, labels, and compliance systems.
Once the agreement is in force, goods entering Great Britain from the EU, or Northern Ireland from Great Britain, are expected to move without export health certificates, phytosanitary certificates, ISPM15 marking for wood packaging material, or Northern Ireland plant health labels in most cases. Dairy, fish, eggs, meat, plants, and plant products would no longer face routine SPS border checks when entering Great Britain from the EU, or Northern Ireland from Great Britain.
Reduced border friction would support chilled, fresh, short-life, and mixed-load food movements, where delay and documentation errors can quickly become cost, spoilage, and service issues. More predictable movement would also help manufacturers planning ingredient deliveries, packaging supply, and finished goods distribution across UK and EU networks.
The compliance burden sits inside the same trade-off. Dynamic alignment with relevant EU SPS rules would bring parts of UK food law closer to the EU framework again, meaning divergence built into products or processes since Brexit may need to be reviewed. Distilled: March 2026 tracked the return of packaging regulation, food contact materials, and SPS alignment to the operational agenda, with compliance increasingly visible as a factory-level cost rather than an abstract policy debate.
Packaging is likely to be one of the more sensitive areas. EU restrictions on bisphenol A and broader food-contact-material rules show how regulatory change can move from legislation into material specification, supplier declarations, migration testing, and line validation. UK manufacturers may need to review wrapping, packaging, contact surfaces, labels, recipes, and raw material specifications where domestic practice has diverged from EU requirements.
The exact detail remains subject to negotiations, but the preparation window is already narrowing for businesses with complex ingredient decks, private-label customers, multiple pack formats, or EU-facing supply chains. Early gap analysis will be less disruptive than late-stage changes to formulation, labelling, certification, or packaging materials once the final framework is in place.