The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that it is intensifying its monitoring of unregistered food products sold in the market.
“We are very serious now. We’re really looking at products that are unregistered,” said FDA Director-General Rolando Enrique Domingo.
“The Center for Food has been working very efficiently and has no backlogs with food registration. Our enforcement unit is really keen now in checking to make sure that all the brands or products out there are registered with FDA,” he added.
Domingo said that this is to “give, of course, the consumers assurance that it has undergone testing and that they are safe.”
The mandate of monitoring the registration status of food products was officially transferred to the FDA in 2017. It was previously the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture.
“The implementation was staggered… Really, before that, there were unregistered food products,” said Domingo.
In September, the FDA issued a list of unregistered food products that included the popular Reno Liver Spread brand. The manufacturer of Reno was able to secure a Certificate of Product Registration last October.
Recently, the FDA also flagged SM Bonus’ Brown Sugar and Refined Sugar as unregistered products. SM Markets then issued a statement that they were pulling out their SM Bonus sugar products “until such time that our supplier is able to meet FDA registration requirements.”