For brands selling into Great Britain
The Hive is the free compliance and ordering platform from Supplement Factory, a UK supplement manufacturer: claim registers, market rules, regulatory alerts, and every quote, order and document you sign, in one account.
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 holds both, with the conditions of use attached to each.
No card. The free account carries unlimited regulatory alerts, your document vault, and quotes and orders with no gate on them ever.
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 official 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.
over 9,000 entries across these sources, every one of them 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 · CC BY 4.0
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 · CC BY 4.0
And the wording there is chosen from a list, not written and then defended.
over 1,000
Proposition 65 listed chemicals for California
California OEHHA · source terms 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: they are held and refreshed, but their row counts are not settled enough internally to publish, and a number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.
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 official 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.
Closes Mistakes 01 and 02
Search the health claim register by ingredient, by claim or by body system. You see the exact permitted wording, the conditions of use including the dose the claim requires, and the entries that are recorded as not permitted. Its job is to let you rule a claim in or out before a designer ever sets it in type.
Closes 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 answers "can this formulation be sold there" at the point the question is still cheap to ask.
Closes Mistake 05
Regulatory alerts and recall notices, filtered to the categories that apply to you. This is the one that runs while you are not looking, and it is on every account including the free one, because an alert that only reaches paying customers is not a safety system.
Closes Mistakes 01, 02 and 04
Ask a regulatory question in plain English and get an answer grounded in the register, with the entry it came from shown alongside it. It will tell you what the register says. It will not tell you what to do, and every answer carries its source so you can check it yourself.
Closes The mistake of not being able to prove it later
Every signed order, set of terms, specification and certificate filed under your account and retrievable by you. When a retailer asks for documentation in eighteen months, or the person who emailed it to you has moved on, it is still there.
Closes The mistake of claiming what you have not verified
Scan a label, see which accredited tests match the ingredients, see the price on screen, send it in. Results and certificates file straight back into your Vault. Free accounts get five per cent off testing, Hive Plus seven and a half, Hive Pro ten.
Closes Mistake 02, at the last possible moment to catch it
Artwork approval runs inside the Hive with the claim register alongside it, so the words on the label can be checked against their authorised wording before the file goes to plate. Approvals and uploads are on the free account. Design and compliance services are priced separately, per project.
Closes The mistake of not asking
A named route to a person, not a ticket queue. Concierge Lite on Hive Plus is a message and a booked client care call with a next-business-day reply. The full service on Hive Pro adds priority handling and arranges the travel and hospitality benefits for you.
Membership is the same everywhere: a permanent free tier, Hive Plus and Hive Pro, priced in pounds sterling excluding VAT. 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.
No. Food supplements are not pre-approved in Great Britain, so there is no registration to obtain and no approval to wait for before you sell.
What replaces it is a permanent 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 official 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, 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 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.
