The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on June 18, 2025, the release of its proposed method for ranking chemicals in the food supply. According to the document, the systematic post-market assessment of food chemicals consists of the following steps: signal detection, triage, prioritization, scoping, scientific assessment (safety, risk, and/or hazard), risk management review, and risk management action. FDA states that it will publish a full description of the process later in 2025 that will describe each of these steps within the context of the systematic post-market assessment process. The document focuses on FDA’s proposed method of prioritizing chemicals identified for post-market assessment using existing information about the food chemical. The method uses Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to determine a score for each chemical based on evaluating the information about a chemical against a pre-determined set of criteria. FDA notes that the method is similar in approach and criteria to one that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses for prioritizing chemicals, but FDA’s method takes into account factors specific to exposure from food and uses a scoring method similar to the FDA’s Risk Ranking Model for Traceability. In FDA’s MCDA method, the higher the total score, the higher the priority of that chemical for post-market assessment. For Public Health criteria, a chemical that would receive the highest score is one for which:
- The chemical may produce severe health effects (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular toxicity);
- Dietary exposure to the chemical has increased;
- The chemical is found in or could potentially be present in food intended for vulnerable subpopulations (e.g., infants); and
- Newly available information, data, or science indicates a potentially high impact on the conclusions of the previous assessment of the chemical.
For Other Decisional criteria, a chemical that would receive the highest score is one for which:
- There is high attention (e.g., congressional and/or national news media coverage) on this chemical, multiple organizations monitoring it, and/or multiple stakeholder groups active in setting standards;
- Multiple other governmental agencies are making decisions or taking action on this chemical; and
- Not assessing this chemical could result in the public losing confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply.
The document includes the following questions for public comment:
Comments are due July 18, 2025. After the public comment period closes, FDA states that it will submit the method and public comments for further evaluation by external scientific experts in line with the requirements of the Information Quality Act (IQA).
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