WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services on Monday announced a new effort to catalog the many additives in the U.S. food supply, most of which entered with little oversight.
Companies looking to add a new substance to human or animal foods will need to notify the Food and Drug Administration, and provide details on how they deemed the additive “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. Manufacturers with GRAS substances already on the market would need to let the FDA know for the first time how the additive is used — information that would be made public in a database, HHS officials said.
