Reviewing the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation (EC) No. 1924/2006: What do we know about its challenges and potential impact on innovation?

Health claims potentially represent an opportunity for firms to engage in product differentiation and thereby induce investment into R&D and innovation in the food sector. The Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation (EC) No. 1924/2006 (NHCR) aims at protecting and promoting innovation as one of its objectives. However, existing studies indicate that this regulation may create several challenges for innovation in the food sector. To this end, we review the challenges related to the NHCR (Article 13.1) and its impact on innovation. Extant literature suggests that companies face challenges related to changing list of ingredients, missing transparency, wording of claims, limited financial resources, limited R&D resources, switching product categories and abandoning the functional foods sector. Moreover, current studies imply that so far the NHCR (in specific Article 13.1) does not seem to encourage innovation in the EU food sector.