Food-contact materials: the migration testing your packaging and tableware need
Anything that touches food — plastic, paper, board or coatings — must meet EU food-contact rules before sale. Here is the migration testing that proves it, and what it costs.
The rule for anything touching food
Framework Regulation (EC) 1935/2004 requires that all food-contact materials (FCM) do not transfer their constituents to food in amounts that could endanger health or unacceptably change the food. For plastics, Regulation (EU) 10/2011 sets the detailed rules — the Union list of permitted substances and the overall migration limit of 10 mg/dm² (or 60 mg/kg for articles for infants and young children). A written Declaration of Compliance, backed by test data, is mandatory before the article goes on the EU market.
The testing that proves compliance
Compliance rests on migration testing: how much transfers from the material into a food simulant under defined time-and-temperature conditions. The fatty-food simulant and repeated-use scenarios are the main cost drivers, because each simulant and each material is a separate run.
- +Overall migration (EU 10/2011) — the 10 mg/dm² baseline, per food simulant
- +Specific migration (SML) — for substances that carry an individual limit
- +Heavy metals — lead, cadmium and others by ICP-MS
- +Primary aromatic amines & PFAS — for printed paper and board
- +Per simulant and per material — each one adds a determination
What it costs
A food-contact migration package is indicatively from €600 net, rising with the number of food simulants (aqueous, acidic, fatty) and material or colour variants. This is the single most requested test family in the EU — and the one importers most often get wrong by testing too few simulants.
Legal basis
Related test package