EC 852/2004: EU Food Hygiene Regulation Summary

EC 852/2004

If you make or sell food in the EU, there’s one regulation that governs your daily life more than any other. It’s not about a specific product or hazard — it’s the law that says your hygiene procedures must be built on HACCP. That’s EC 852/2004.

Definition

Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 is the EU’s general food hygiene law. Its core demand: every food business must put in place, implement, and maintain hygiene procedures based on HACCP principles.

Key facts

• Beyond HACCP, it sets general hygiene requirements: premises and equipment design, water supply, personal hygiene, training, pest control, temperature control — the full GHP package.
• Small businesses get flexibility: where appropriate, they can follow recognized guides to good practice instead of building bespoke HACCP documentation from scratch.
• Primary production (farms) is covered differently — Annex I good hygiene practices rather than full HACCP.
• Enforcement sits with member-state authorities, and the tools are real: improvement notices, fines, closure.
• It doesn’t stand alone — EC 853/2004 adds specifics for animal-origin foods, and the Official Controls Regulation 2017/625 governs how inspections work.

Why it matters

“We follow HACCP” in the EU isn’t a marketing claim — it’s a legal obligation, and inspectors check the procedures and the records to prove it. Too many businesses treat this regulation as background noise until an inspection finds their HACCP plan is a copied template that doesn’t match their actual process. That never ends well. The regulation rewards one thing above all: procedures that describe what you actually do, followed by people who actually follow them.

The regulation’s flexibility for small and traditional businesses is real but not a free pass — the food safety outcomes are still required; only the means may be adapted.

Sources: EUR-Lex (official EU law); EFSA.

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