Under regulation 1924/2006 any food product claiming to have a health or nutritional benefit must meet a list of European Commission approved wording, and be supported by science. To have a chance of a claim being included on EFSA's positive list of generally accepted claims, companies must submit a proposal to their national regulator, which then forwards the claim to EFSA by January.
The claims, which fall under article 13 of the regulation, must be substantiated on the basis of generally accepted scientific evidence, and be well understood by the average consumer. This article covers general function claims, such as "calcium helps maintain bone strength."
EFSA will evaluate article 13 claims during 2008 and 2009, but is under no obligation to accept every one submitted to them by Members States when drawing up its list of approved claims, which will then be given back to the Commission for a final decision.
At a conference organized by the Association of the European Self-Medication Industry (AESGP) on Wednesday, the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) said it had received up to 2,000 article 13 claims.
Basil Mathioudakis, head of food law, nutrition and labelling at the Commission said: "I am a little bit concerned by the numbers which have been circulating," adding that he has heard of one country with a figure of around 4,000.
He said: "There is screening for some of them which will, I expect, reduce the numbers submitted to EFSA. I think the time will come for commission and member states to sit down and do some work before the community lists."
The volume of claims so far shows a clear sign of the scale of the task facing EFSA, which will evaluate whether the scientific backing to each claim is there, with the aim of a community list by the end of January 2010.
What is more, it is likely that companies whose claims do not make it onto EFSA's list will then submit scientific dossiers under other articles for individual assessment.
EFSA will then have just five months to give an opinion on these dossiers, but it has already said this timeframe will prove tough if it received a barrage all in one go.
Albert Flynn, chairman of EFSA's panel on dietetic products and nutrition said the EFSA is in charge of judging the validity of the claims. He said: "We expect that it will be a very big task, particularly as a large number of which have not come forward to the EC yet."
Noel Griffin from the FSA said the authority had received a large number of claims - mainly submitted just days before the September cut-off point - adding: "I cannot give an exact number because we are still going through them," but he said it was somewhere in the region of 1,500 to 2,000. The group was expecting some duplications and hoped to reduce the list to some 1,000.
He added that for one of the criteria - whether a health claim is understood by the consumer - there "is not much we can do about this" and said this is something which needs to be addressed in the future.
Also speaking at the conference, Kaisa Vaihia, from Finland's Ministry of Trade and Industry, said the country had received 625 responses for claims, which covered 269 food substances. She said the claims were approximately split between ordinary food and food supplements.
Vaihia said the country had set strict elimination criteria to reduce the load which it will submit to the commission in January.
The issue has been mired in uncertainty since no guidelines have been issued by EFSA concerning how much or what type of scientific evidence is needed, and how the "average consumer" is defined.
Consumer understanding is not assessed by EFSA, but on the subject of whether consumers understand the health claim, Mathioudakis said the commission will try and tackle how claims are interpreted.
A date for future meetings with Member States over health claims has not yet been set.
