Britain could become one of the first countries in the world to formally authorise cannabidiol (CBD) as a novel food, as the Food Standards Agency (FSA) recommends three applications for ministerial approval in a move that could bring an estimated 3,000 products into legal compliance.
In a board paper published on September 3, 2026, the agency said it would ‘recommend that the FSA now advises Ministers in England and Wales to authorise the three high-purity CBD novel foods’. Should the recommendation hold, it added, ‘the resultant authorisations will be a regulatory first for Great Britain’.
Despite being more than six years and millions of pounds in the making, it remains a hollow victory. In the same board paper, the FSA states explicitly that ‘GB authorisations would cease to apply’ once the UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement currently in the works comes into force.
In essence, not long after the long, arduous and costly CBD novel food saga reaches its conclusion — the agreement is expected to take effect in 2027 — authority could pass to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and the process would begin again, this time with a regulator imposing even stricter limits on CBD products.
BofC Intelligence EU Regulation Hub Tracking legal status, market access, and regulatory developments across 28 European countries — with market data from Prohibition Partners.
Explore the hub →
CBD has sold across the UK for years in a legal grey zone, tolerated on a public list of products awaiting assessment but never formally authorised.
Authorisation would give retailers and manufacturers a compliant route to market for the first time, and the three applications now being recommended for ministerial approval span roughly 3,000 individual products, according to the FSA.
The three applications include the synthetic CBD of Pureis (RP 7), Cannaray’s CBD isolate (RP 350) and the EIHA Consortium’s isolate (RP 427). Each of the applicants has also requested data protection for the proprietary data behind their respective dossiers. Where the FSA judges the conditions met, the product would be authorised exclusively to that applicant for five years, shutting competitors out of relying on the same evidence.
All three would also be authorised at a maximum daily intake of 10mg, well below the doses used in most existing products, and carry mandatory warnings against use by under-18s, pregnant or breastfeeding women, those trying to conceive, people on medication and the immunosuppressed.
Cannaray’s application is the broadest of the three. RP 350 is the only one cleared for beverages and confectionery as well as food supplements, while the Pureis and EIHA dossiers are limited to supplements.
‘If authorisation follows, Cannaray would be the only one of the three applications cleared for drinks and confectionery alongside food supplements,’ Joshua Roberts, Interim Managing Director of Cannaray Brands, said in a statement.
He added that the milestone ‘represents six years of scientific work and investment’, noting the company entered the process in February 2020.
The recommendation is not the final word. The FSA board will be asked at its meeting on September 16 to agree that the recommendation is ‘suitable for presentation to Ministers’. The paper will be presented by Rebecca Sudworth, the FSA’s Director of Policy, and Thomas Vincent, its Deputy Director of Innovation; if the board agrees, officials will ‘finalise the ministerial advice package for submission to ministers in England and Wales as soon as possible’.
Ministers in England and Wales then take the decision, with the Minister for Health in Northern Ireland kept informed.
‘It is Ministers that will make the final decision on authorisations,’ the paper states. No parliamentary vote or statutory instrument is required.
The authorisations may prove short-lived. The recommendation arrives as the UK and EU finalise a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement that could subject CBD to dynamic alignment with EU food law, transferring oversight to EFSA.
While the FSA’s 10mg daily limit is already contentious among industry stakeholders, it sits five times above the 2mg provisional safe intake level EFSA published in February 2026, a threshold the industry argues would leave almost no room for a functioning market.
The FSA acknowledges the risk in the paper itself, warning that ‘in the absence of any exception, businesses would no longer apply to the FSA/FSS for novel food authorisations and would have to apply under EU legislation instead’. The paper notes the EU has accepted there may be ‘a limited number of areas where the UK will need to retain its own rules’, but whether CBD secures such an exception remains unresolved.
The prospect, as we’ve reported previously, would hand a file the UK has spent six years building to a regulator that paused its own CBD assessments over data gaps.
The authorisations may prove short-lived. The recommendation arrives as the UK and EU finalise a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement that could subject CBD to dynamic alignment with EU food law, transferring oversight to EFSA.
The gap between the two regimes is wide. The FSA’s 10mg daily limit sits five times above the 2mg provisional safe intake level EFSA published in February 2026, a threshold the industry argues would leave almost no room for a functioning market.
The FSA acknowledges the risk in the paper itself, warning that ‘in the absence of any exception, businesses would no longer apply to the FSA/FSS for novel food authorisations and would have to apply under EU legislation instead’.
The prospect, as we’ve reported previously would hand a file the UK has spent six years building to a regulator that paused its own CBD assessments over data gaps.
One reason for optimism for these three operators, and the industry at large, is that the SPS deal is not a foregone conclusion, and the timetable behind it has slipped amid political upheaval.
A UK-EU summit intended to advance the reset was postponed after the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June 2026 and the Labour leadership contest that followed.
The UK is now targeting conclusion by early 2027, though officials stress this is not a fixed deadline, and farming groups, the sector watching alignment most closely, warn the delay has weakened Britain’s hand.
“Where previously the EU had 90% of the advantage, I think they’ve now got 100%,” Tom Bradshaw, President of the National Farmers’ Union, said in June.
For CBD, the decisive question, whether the ingredient secures an exception from alignment, remains unconfirmed, and any carve-out would face strict conditions.
Of the roughly 800 applications that entered the FSA’s novel food process, just 15 have passed the safety assessment, and only three now stand recommended for authorisation. The FSA’s own public list of CBD products has fallen from nearly 12,000 when it closed in July 2022 to around 3,000 today.
Prohibition Partners’ data suggests that European CBD sales are forecast at around €1.9bn in 2025, rising to just €2.2bn by 2029, a market it describes as having ‘limited prospects for significant expansion’.
The Centre for Medicinal Cannabis valued the UK CBD market at £300m in 2019 and projected it would approach £1bn by 2025, with six million adults having used a CBD product.
The post FSA Backs Britain’s First CBD Food Authorisations as Brexit Deal Threatens to Override Them appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
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In a board paper published on September 3, 2026, the agency said it would ‘recommend that the FSA now advises Ministers in England and Wales to authorise the three high-purity CBD novel foods’. Should the recommendation hold, it added, ‘the resultant authorisations will be a regulatory first for Great Britain’.
Despite being more than six years and millions of pounds in the making, it remains a hollow victory. In the same board paper, the FSA states explicitly that ‘GB authorisations would cease to apply’ once the UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement currently in the works comes into force.
In essence, not long after the long, arduous and costly CBD novel food saga reaches its conclusion — the agreement is expected to take effect in 2027 — authority could pass to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and the process would begin again, this time with a regulator imposing even stricter limits on CBD products.
BofC Intelligence EU Regulation Hub Tracking legal status, market access, and regulatory developments across 28 European countries — with market data from Prohibition Partners.
Explore the hub →
Three applications verge on authorisation
CBD has sold across the UK for years in a legal grey zone, tolerated on a public list of products awaiting assessment but never formally authorised.
Authorisation would give retailers and manufacturers a compliant route to market for the first time, and the three applications now being recommended for ministerial approval span roughly 3,000 individual products, according to the FSA.
The three applications include the synthetic CBD of Pureis (RP 7), Cannaray’s CBD isolate (RP 350) and the EIHA Consortium’s isolate (RP 427). Each of the applicants has also requested data protection for the proprietary data behind their respective dossiers. Where the FSA judges the conditions met, the product would be authorised exclusively to that applicant for five years, shutting competitors out of relying on the same evidence.
All three would also be authorised at a maximum daily intake of 10mg, well below the doses used in most existing products, and carry mandatory warnings against use by under-18s, pregnant or breastfeeding women, those trying to conceive, people on medication and the immunosuppressed.
Cannaray’s application is the broadest of the three. RP 350 is the only one cleared for beverages and confectionery as well as food supplements, while the Pureis and EIHA dossiers are limited to supplements.
‘If authorisation follows, Cannaray would be the only one of the three applications cleared for drinks and confectionery alongside food supplements,’ Joshua Roberts, Interim Managing Director of Cannaray Brands, said in a statement.
He added that the milestone ‘represents six years of scientific work and investment’, noting the company entered the process in February 2020.
The recommendation is not the final word. The FSA board will be asked at its meeting on September 16 to agree that the recommendation is ‘suitable for presentation to Ministers’. The paper will be presented by Rebecca Sudworth, the FSA’s Director of Policy, and Thomas Vincent, its Deputy Director of Innovation; if the board agrees, officials will ‘finalise the ministerial advice package for submission to ministers in England and Wales as soon as possible’.
Ministers in England and Wales then take the decision, with the Minister for Health in Northern Ireland kept informed.
‘It is Ministers that will make the final decision on authorisations,’ the paper states. No parliamentary vote or statutory instrument is required.
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The Brussels problem
The authorisations may prove short-lived. The recommendation arrives as the UK and EU finalise a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement that could subject CBD to dynamic alignment with EU food law, transferring oversight to EFSA.
While the FSA’s 10mg daily limit is already contentious among industry stakeholders, it sits five times above the 2mg provisional safe intake level EFSA published in February 2026, a threshold the industry argues would leave almost no room for a functioning market.
The FSA acknowledges the risk in the paper itself, warning that ‘in the absence of any exception, businesses would no longer apply to the FSA/FSS for novel food authorisations and would have to apply under EU legislation instead’. The paper notes the EU has accepted there may be ‘a limited number of areas where the UK will need to retain its own rules’, but whether CBD secures such an exception remains unresolved.
The prospect, as we’ve reported previously, would hand a file the UK has spent six years building to a regulator that paused its own CBD assessments over data gaps.
The authorisations may prove short-lived. The recommendation arrives as the UK and EU finalise a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement that could subject CBD to dynamic alignment with EU food law, transferring oversight to EFSA.
The gap between the two regimes is wide. The FSA’s 10mg daily limit sits five times above the 2mg provisional safe intake level EFSA published in February 2026, a threshold the industry argues would leave almost no room for a functioning market.
The FSA acknowledges the risk in the paper itself, warning that ‘in the absence of any exception, businesses would no longer apply to the FSA/FSS for novel food authorisations and would have to apply under EU legislation instead’.
The prospect, as we’ve reported previously would hand a file the UK has spent six years building to a regulator that paused its own CBD assessments over data gaps.
One reason for optimism for these three operators, and the industry at large, is that the SPS deal is not a foregone conclusion, and the timetable behind it has slipped amid political upheaval.
A UK-EU summit intended to advance the reset was postponed after the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June 2026 and the Labour leadership contest that followed.
The UK is now targeting conclusion by early 2027, though officials stress this is not a fixed deadline, and farming groups, the sector watching alignment most closely, warn the delay has weakened Britain’s hand.
“Where previously the EU had 90% of the advantage, I think they’ve now got 100%,” Tom Bradshaw, President of the National Farmers’ Union, said in June.
For CBD, the decisive question, whether the ingredient secures an exception from alignment, remains unconfirmed, and any carve-out would face strict conditions.
Of the roughly 800 applications that entered the FSA’s novel food process, just 15 have passed the safety assessment, and only three now stand recommended for authorisation. The FSA’s own public list of CBD products has fallen from nearly 12,000 when it closed in July 2022 to around 3,000 today.
Prohibition Partners’ data suggests that European CBD sales are forecast at around €1.9bn in 2025, rising to just €2.2bn by 2029, a market it describes as having ‘limited prospects for significant expansion’.
The Centre for Medicinal Cannabis valued the UK CBD market at £300m in 2019 and projected it would approach £1bn by 2025, with six million adults having used a CBD product.
The post FSA Backs Britain’s First CBD Food Authorisations as Brexit Deal Threatens to Override Them appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
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