Thai FDA Publishes Its Current List of Recognized Food and Novel Food Safety Assessment Bodies

A safety assessment dossier is only as good as the body that produced it, and Thai FDA has now made unambiguous which bodies count. On September 17, 2025, the Food Division published two related updates on its own archive at food.fda.moph.go.th: a current list of accredited food safety assessment units it recognizes, alongside guidance on the general food safety assessment process, and, the same day, a separate list of accredited Novel Food safety assessment units it recognizes, alongside guidance on the Novel Food assessment process specifically. Together the two publications settle a question that matters far more than its administrative framing suggests: which third-party bodies a manufacturer can actually use to produce the safety assessment work Thai FDA will accept.

For any brand with a food or novel food ingredient dossier in progress, or one being planned, this is worth treating as a checklist item rather than background reading. The scientific quality of an assessment report does not save it if the body that wrote it is not on Thai FDA's current recognized list.

Two related lists, two distinct purposes

Thai FDA's Food Division maintains recognition lists because it does not perform every safety assessment itself. Certain categories of food and food ingredient approval require an assessment produced by a body Thai FDA has vetted and accepted in advance, not simply any laboratory or academic institution capable of the underlying science. The September 17, 2025 publications refresh two separate tracks of that recognition system at once.

The first track covers food safety assessment generally: the list of accredited units Thai FDA recognizes for standard food safety assessment work, paired with guidance describing how that assessment process runs from engagement through Thai FDA's own review. The second track is narrower and covers Novel Food specifically: a distinct list of accredited Novel Food safety assessment units, paired with guidance describing the Novel Food assessment process on its own terms. The two lists are not identical, and a body's presence on one does not guarantee its presence on the other. A company should confirm which list actually governs its specific dossier before assuming any assessment body is qualified to produce it.

Publishing both lists on the same day is itself informative. It signals that Thai FDA treats the general food assessment framework and the Novel Food framework as parallel systems that get maintained together, even though a Novel Food dossier and a standard food safety dossier answer different regulatory questions and can, in some cases, involve different accredited bodies entirely.

Why the assessment body matters as much as the assessment itself

A manufacturer preparing a food or Novel Food ingredient dossier does not perform its own safety assessment. It commissions the work from a body Thai FDA has already accredited for that purpose, and that body's report becomes the evidentiary foundation Thai FDA reviews when it decides whether to accept the ingredient, condition its approval, or reject the dossier outright. This structure means the choice of assessment body is not a procurement detail to settle after the science is done. It is a threshold requirement that has to be satisfied before the science can count for anything at all.

A company that commissions an otherwise rigorous safety assessment from a body that is not on Thai FDA's current recognized list has not produced a weaker dossier. It has produced a dossier Thai FDA has no obligation to accept, regardless of how thorough the underlying toxicological or historical-use evidence turns out to be. The recognition requirement sits ahead of scientific merit in the review sequence, and a rejection on that basis wastes the months or years of assessment work that came before it, not just the filing fee.

This is precisely the risk the September 17, 2025 lists are meant to close off. By publishing current, dated lists rather than leaving manufacturers to rely on an assessment body's own claims of accreditation or on outdated secondary references, Thai FDA gives applicants a way to confirm eligibility before committing budget and time to a specific body's work.

The practical connection to Thailand's 15-year Novel Food rule

This publication lands directly on top of an issue DeeMED has already guided clients through: Thailand's Novel Food framework under MOPH Notification No. 376 B.E. 2559 (2016), which treats any ingredient with less than 15 years of documented Thai food use as novel and requires a safety assessment before the product containing it can be approved. That assessment has always had to come from a Thai FDA-recognized risk assessment center. What changes with the September 17, 2025 publication is not the underlying rule, but the currency and specificity of the list a brand needs to check against before engaging anyone.

A brand that commissioned its Novel Food assessment work from a center that was recognized a year or two ago cannot assume that recognition still holds without checking the current list. Recognition lists are maintained documents, not permanent designations, and a body's status can change between publications. The safer practice is treating each new dossier as an occasion to reconfirm the assessment body's current standing, not to rely on a prior engagement's outcome as proof of ongoing eligibility.

This matters more for Novel Food dossiers than it might first appear, because the assessment work itself already runs long. Engaging a Thai FDA-recognized risk assessment center, compiling the historical-use and toxicological evidence package, and waiting for the center to produce its formal report is a process that commonly stretches from several months to well over a year, depending on the ingredient and how complete the available safety data already is. None of that time is refundable if the finished report comes from a body that has since dropped off, or never actually appeared on, Thai FDA's current recognized list. Confirming the body's status against the September 17, 2025 list, or whatever supersedes it later, is a check that takes an afternoon; discovering the problem after the report is finished can add another full assessment cycle to the timeline.

The same logic extends beyond Novel Food specifically. Any manufacturer working through a standard food safety assessment, not just a Novel Food one, should confirm the accredited unit it plans to engage appears on the corresponding current list before signing an engagement letter or releasing a budget for the work. Given how long a thorough safety assessment already takes, discovering an eligibility problem only after the report is finished is the single most avoidable delay in the entire approval timeline.

What this means for a dossier already in motion

A brand with an assessment already underway, or one about to commission one, should treat the September 17, 2025 lists as the current source of truth rather than whatever list or reputation informed the original choice of assessment body. Confirming eligibility is a short check relative to the cost of finding out after the fact that a completed assessment cannot be used. It is a simple step to build into any Thailand market-entry timeline, and it is far cheaper to run before an engagement letter is signed than to discover after a finished report has already been submitted and rejected on eligibility grounds alone. DeeMED Consulting checks a client's proposed food or Novel Food safety assessment body against Thai FDA's current recognized lists before any engagement begins, as part of the same ingredient approval and Novel Food process that governs the rest of a formula's path to market in Thailand.