How Is Health Food Managed in China?

Health food refers to food products which are claimed to have certain specific health functions or c…

Health food refers to food products which are claimed to have certain specific health functions or can supplement certain vitamins and/or minerals and have been legitimately licensed for the same. In other words, the foods are suitable for certain people to help them improve body functions without the purpose of therapy, and will bring no acute, sub-acute or chronic harm to human body.

By definition, we can see that health foods are different from medicines for the purpose of treating diseases, and normal foods for the purpose of providing nutrition. How is such a special product managed by China?


In China, health food is mainly regulated by the market supervision and management department. Its supervision of health foods is “wider than medicine and stricter than food”, which mainly includes three parts:

Pre-production approval：Before the production of health food, the enterprise must first register or record the health food and obtain the health food production license. The former is to check whether the product formula is safe and effective, and the latter is to check whether the enterprise has the production conditions of health food.

Production process supervision：In the process of health food products, the market supervision department will conduct random production inspections for health food enterprises and correct the problems found in time.

Post-marketing supervision：After the health food is listed, the market supervision department will conduct random inspections of the health foods on the market, and notify and investigate the problem products.

As what we can see from the above, China implements “full-scale supervision” on health foods, covering all aspects of pre-production, production process and sales. Judging from the results of the sampling test in the past two years, the pass rate of sampling of health foods is usually higher than the average level of food, indicating that China attaches great importance to the supervision of health foods, and the supervision has achieved good results.