Which hazards to test for in EU imports, by origin and product

This guide is for laboratories, certification bodies and QA teams who need to decide what to test an imported product for. It gives you a lookup table of the 15 biggest origin-and-product lines in the EU's RASFF data since 2023, with the hazards the EU actually found in each and how often. Then it shows how to turn a row into a test plan, and where the table will mislead you.

RASFF is the EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed. Member states notify it when they find a risk in food or feed, either at the border or already on the market. The table below counts every classification: border rejections, alerts and information notifications.

The table

Window: 1 January 2023 to 21 September 2026 (the last three complete years plus 2026 so far), 19,328 notifications. Shares are the part of that line's notifications that cite each hazard. One notification can cite several hazards, so shares in a row can add up to more than 100%.

Poland and France are EU member states, so their products are notified from inside the market and have no border-rejection page. The linked product pages count border rejections only, over the last 12 quarters, so their totals are smaller than the ones here.

How to use the table

Step 1: Find your line, not just your country. An origin total mixes products with nothing in common. Turkey appears four times, and each Turkish line has a different main hazard: mycotoxins in figs, pesticides in peppers and citrus, pyrrolizidine alkaloids in herbs. Test for the hazard of the product, not the reputation of the country.

Step 2: Read the top hazard as your baseline test. Where one hazard covers most of a line, as aflatoxins do in US and Argentine peanuts (99% and 98%), that is the test the EU runs and the one a consignment fails. A sampling plan that leaves it out is testing for something else.

Step 3: For pesticides, specify a multi-residue screen and name the actives. In pesticide-heavy lines, no single active dominates. In Turkish peppers, formetanate appears in 24% of notifications and acetamiprid in 23%. Ask the lab for a multi-residue method, then check that its scope covers the actives named in the row and on the product page.

Step 4: Look at the second and third hazards. Pakistani rice is mostly pesticides (66%), but aflatoxins appear in 22% of its notifications. A pesticide screen alone would not have caught the aflatoxins found in more than one notification in five.

Step 5: Check the EU's own control level on the product page. For many of these lines, EU Regulation 2019/1793 sets a share of consignments that get identity and physical checks at the border. Listings apply to exact products (CN codes), and one product page can group several products, so confirm your exact product in the regulation's annexes. Nigerian sesame faces 50% checks for Salmonella, the hazard leading its row. In Turkish herbs and spices, dried oregano faces 30% checks and cumin 50%, both for pyrrolizidine alkaloids. Part of what the table shows is where the EU looks hardest.

Worked example: dried figs from Turkey

A buyer asks your lab to set up release testing for Turkish dried figs.

1. The row shows 594 notifications since January 2023, the second-largest line in the table.
2. Ochratoxin A appears in 52% of them and aflatoxins in 47%. Neither alone covers the line. You need both.
3. Pesticide residues appear in 8%. That is small beside the mycotoxins, but not zero. A periodic multi-residue screen is reasonable. It does not need to run on every lot.
4. Under Regulation 2019/1793, dried figs from Turkey face identity and physical checks on 30% of consignments for aflatoxins and ochratoxin A: the same two toxins that lead the row. (Pistachios, a separate product, are checked at 50% for aflatoxins.)
5. Plan: aflatoxins and ochratoxin A on every lot, a pesticide screen on a rotating sample, and a sampling plan built for mycotoxins. EU sampling rules note that aflatoxins are very unevenly spread in lots of large-particle foods such as dried figs and groundnuts, so one small grab sample can miss them.

The aflatoxins page ranks every origin for the same hazard. Use it if the buyer is thinking about a second source.

Pitfalls

• The table covers a fifth of the data, not most of it. These 15 lines hold 3,769 of the 19,328 notifications (19.5%). There are 2,256 origin-and-product lines in the window. For anything outside the table, open the product page or the hazard pages.
• It shows what authorities tested for, not a full risk assessment. A hazard nobody samples for never appears in RASFF. Use the table to make sure you cover what gets caught. Then add what your own hazard analysis requires.
• Low counts mean no evidence either way. Two-thirds of lines (1,513 of 2,256) have fewer than five notifications. A short record means few findings, which can mean clean product, low volumes or little sampling. It is not a clean bill of health.
• Some notifications name no hazard. 26% of all notifications in the window cite none. Often the problem is documents, not contents. Nigerian sesame has 54 such notifications, and 39 of them mention a certificate in the subject. Sudanese sesame had 154 notifications, and only one named a hazard: 151 of the others mention a certificate. That is why it is not in the table. Supplements from the US and the UK are left out for the same reason: most of their notifications name no hazard. No lab test fixes a missing health certificate.
• Hazard names vary. RASFF records "Aflatoxin B1", "aflatoxin total" and "aflatoxins" separately, and dozens of Salmonella serotypes. This table folds them together. The product pages show the raw names, so the counts there will be split.
• Recent months are incomplete. 2026 covers less than nine months, and the current week is still filling up.

Set up a watch

The table changes as new notifications arrive. Set up a watch for aflatoxins, and you will get at most one email a week when a new aflatoxin notification is published, from any origin.