January 1st has gone.
Nothing has changed. Not a surprise, for those informed about the new Novel Food Regulation.
But this is also a problem.
Reality is different from country to country, a grey fog is covering everything and for the consumers the situation is not clear. For entrepreneurs either. Many have real confused ideas on the “transition period“, what is or isn’t possibile to do during that period, and so on. But this could be easily solved hiring a food law expert.
The problem is that until the moment the companies haven’t obtained the authorization, the products can’t reach the supermarkets’ shelves and edible insects can’t be served in the restaurants across Europe.
From our observatory, we see a lot of interest for edible insects products coming from the large-scale organized distributors or directly from ipermarkets chains, the same from restaurants or fastfood chains, and we think it’s urgent the industry speeds up to be in the conditions to supply this kind of clients.
It’s everyday harder to keep the lights of media on the issue, they’ve flooded the audience with tons of news about edible insects in the past year and a half and the risk is the people get bored to listen to the news but not find the products on the shop around the corner or at their usual supermarket. Interest could easily fade away, especially in this era of continuous novelties.
So, that’s a urgent call (and it’s not our first): cooperate, try to make collective applications, find a new funder to support the costs, melt six companies in a bigger one and face the procedure. But do it.
Just do it (quotation).