For brands selling into Great Britain
The Hive is the regulatory information and ordering platform from Supplement Factory, a UK supplement manufacturer. It brings published claim registers, market rules, regulatory alerts, and your quotes, orders and signed documents into one account. For business customers only.
Nobody approves a food supplement before it goes on sale in Great Britain, which sounds like freedom and behaves like exposure: the first official opinion on your product can arrive after the stock exists, from a local authority or trading standards. Great Britain also keeps its own nutrition and health claims register, published separately from the European one, so the entry you checked in Brussels is not automatically the entry that governs you in Bristol. The Hive mirrors both, with the conditions of use attached to each.
The Hive brings PRAS+ alerts, your Vault, and your quotes and orders into one account. For business customers only.
What is actually in there
Two things, and they are different things. For Great Britain the Hive mirrors the registers that decide what you may say and what you may use. For everywhere a UK brand exports to, it mirrors those markets’ registers too, so the export question is answered in the same place as the domestic one.
The published GB register on GOV.UK · Open Government Licence v3.0
Authorised entries and non-authorised entries, each with the conditions of use attached to it, including the dose a claim requires. It is harvested from its own published release and held as its own jurisdiction: a British question returns British rows, and the two registers are never blended into one answer.
Food Standards Agency, data.food.gov.uk
Whether an ingredient is authorised as a novel food for Great Britain, and on what conditions. An unauthorised novel food cannot lawfully be marketed, and it is the one status that stops a formulation dead rather than merely trimming a claim.
The Hive’s Market Registrations tool
Classification, ingredients and novel food, claims, mandatory labelling, and the evidence pack you are expected to be able to produce: ingredient specifications, claims substantiation, label proof and supplier traceability.
The US, Californian and Australian registers hold over 9,000 entries as at the date of publication. We do not publish counts for the GB and EU registers. Every source is attributed.
Mirrored
European health claim entries, permitted and not permitted
European Commission register, on EFSA opinions · CC BY 4.0
First for a British brand, because most of them also sell into the EU, and because the two registers have to be read against each other rather than assumed identical.
over 1,300
GRAS notices for the United States
US Food and Drug Administration · public domain
The usual first export question after Europe: whether the ingredient has a standing the FDA has already seen.
over 1,300
new dietary ingredient notifications for the United States
US Food and Drug Administration · public domain
The other half of that question, for anything newer than the 1994 cutoff American law works from.
over 5,000
permissible ingredients for the Australian market
Therapeutic Goods Administration · publisher terms of use apply
Australia runs closed lists rather than a food-label model, so it is the export market most likely to reject a formula outright.
over 1,000
permitted indications for the Australian market
Therapeutic Goods Administration · publisher terms of use apply
And the wording there is chosen from a list, not written and then defended.
over 900
Proposition 65 listed chemicals for California
California OEHHA · publisher terms of use apply
Last, and still the one that catches British exporters: a Californian warning obligation that federal compliance does not cover.
Figures are stated as "over" because the registers are re-imported on a schedule and grow. The Great Britain claim register, GB novel food status and the European claim register are described above without a figure on purpose: we do not publish counts for those.
The local part
These are not exotic. Every one of them is ordinary practice somewhere else in the world, or was ordinary practice here five years ago, which is precisely why they are missed.
They began as one list and they are maintained separately, so a status you confirmed against the European register is evidence about the European market and nothing more. The Hive harvests them from two published sources for exactly that reason, never blends them into a single verdict, and tells you which register an answer came from.
Some entries are transitional or on hold rather than plainly authorised or plainly refused. The safe reading is that an on-hold claim is a higher-risk claim, and that its current status has to be checked against the register rather than remembered from last year.
Refusals are published alongside approvals, and they are the half nobody reads. It is also the half your risk lives in: a claim that was assessed and refused is not a grey area you can argue your way through with better wording.
Present a product as treating or preventing disease and it can fall under medicines regulation and the MHRA instead of food law. That is not a stronger version of the same rule. It is a different regime, with a different route to market that your product has not taken.
Northern Ireland may differ from Great Britain in some areas because of the regulatory alignments that apply there. If your distribution covers the whole of the United Kingdom, that is a question to ask early rather than a footnote to discover at a border.
There is no registration to obtain and no approval to receive. What replaces it is an expectation that you can produce the evidence (ingredient specifications, claims substantiation, label proof, supplier traceability) at the moment somebody asks, which is rarely a convenient moment.
Inside the Hive
The same eight tools, each built against a specific mistake we have watched brands make. Nothing on this list is UK-only; what is UK-specific is which register the answer comes out of.
Relates to Mistakes 01 and 02
Search the health claim register by ingredient, by claim or by body system. You see the permitted wording, the conditions of use including the dose the claim requires, and the entries that are recorded as not permitted. It helps you check a claim before a designer sets it in type.
Relates to Mistake 03
The requirements for each market you are considering, in one place: what has to be notified, what is restricted, what a label has to carry. It helps you ask whether a formulation can be sold in a market while the question is still cheap to ask.
Relates to Mistake 05
PRAS+ alerts you to changes in the sources it monitors, for the categories you select. It may not cover every change. Regulatory alerts and recall notices are included for Supplement Factory customers.
Relates to Mistakes 01, 02 and 04
Ask a regulatory question in plain English. Supplement Genius is designed to answer from the registers and show the entry, publisher and date. Check the source before relying on an answer. It tells you what the register says, not what to do about your product.
Relates to The mistake of not being able to prove it later
Signed orders, terms, specifications and certificates are filed under your account and available to you there, so you are not searching an old email thread when a retailer asks for documentation.
Relates to The mistake of claiming what you have not verified
Scan a label, see which tests match the ingredients, see the price on screen, send it in. Results and certificates are filed to your Vault. Access is included and tests are charged. Every membership level carries a discount on testing.
Relates to Mistake 02
Artwork approvals and uploads run inside the Hive and are part of the Hive. Design and compliance services are priced separately, per project.
Relates to The mistake of not asking
Message your concierge and book a client care call. Concierge Lite on Hive Plus covers messages and booked calls, and we aim to reply as quickly as we can. The full service on Hive Pro adds priority handling and arranges the travel and hospitality benefits for you.
Membership is the same everywhere: The Hive, Hive Plus and Hive Pro. For business customers only. See the full pricing.
Straight answers
These are answers about how the rules work and what the Hive shows you. They are not advice about your product, and nothing here replaces your own regulatory or legal counsel.
There is no product licence or pre-approval in Great Britain, but you must register as a food business with your local authority.
What replaces it is a continuing responsibility. The operator is responsible for compliance at all times, enforcement runs through local authorities and trading standards after the product is on sale, and you are expected to hold the evidence behind it. Several export markets do work differently, which is why market rules are a separate question from British ones.
No. Great Britain maintains its own nutrition and health claims register, published separately from the European Commission’s register.
They share an origin, which is what makes the difference easy to miss. The Hive imports them as two distinct registers from two distinct published sources, and every answer it gives says which register it came from and when that register was last checked. If you sell into both, you have two questions and not one.
Using a claim that is not authorised on the GB register (listed claims that are on hold may continue to be used on conditions), rewording an authorised claim until it no longer carries the same meaning, or making an authorised claim while your product misses its conditions of use.
The condition is the part that surprises people. Many authorised claims carry a minimum amount per serving, so an ingredient can be on your label, at a real and honest dose, and still not entitle you to the claim. The Hive shows the authorised wording and its conditions together, because separating them is how a compliant label becomes a non-compliant one.
A novel food is a food or ingredient without a significant history of consumption in the market before the relevant cut-off, and it requires authorisation before it can be marketed.
Great Britain keeps its own novel food position, published by the Food Standards Agency, and the Hive mirrors it. This is the check worth doing first, before dose and before wording, because an unauthorised novel food is not a claim you trim: it is a formulation you cannot sell.
When it is presented as treating, preventing or curing disease, at which point it can be regulated as a medicinal product rather than a food.
Classification follows presentation, not intent, so the risk sits in your marketing copy as much as in your formulation. "Contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism" is a food supplement talking. "Cures arthritis" is a medicine talking, and it is a medicine that has not been through any of the things a medicine goes through.
Not automatically. Northern Ireland may differ from Great Britain in some areas because of the regulatory alignments that apply there.
If you distribute across the whole of the United Kingdom, treat it as a separate question rather than an assumption, and settle it before packaging is committed rather than after a shipment stops.
Great Britain will not tell you your label is wrong until it is expensive to be wrong. The register is public, it is checkable, and the whole point of the Hive is that you read it on a Tuesday afternoon rather than in a recall meeting.
