The short answer surprises most people: in the United Kingdom any registered business can sell food supplements. No qualification, no pharmacy monopoly, no licence to apply for before you start. What is regulated is not the seller but the product and its label. And that is where the obligations differ sharply depending on whether you resell an existing brand or launch your own.<\/p>\n
General information<\/p>\n
This page summarises the framework applying in Great Britain at the date of publication, to help a trade buyer get their bearings. It is not legal advice and does not replace checking with the Food Standards Agency or your local authority, who decide on individual cases.<\/p>\n
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This is the starting point for everything else. Food supplements sit in food law, not medicines law. Selling them is therefore not reserved to pharmacists: a gym, a specialist shop, an online store or a practitioner’s clinic can sell them just as legitimately as a pharmacy. Businesses selling food must register with their local authority, which is a registration rather than a licence, and it is free.<\/p>\n
The flip side of that freedom is strict: a supplement must never present itself as a treatment. Claiming that a product treats, cures or prevents a disease pushes it legally into the medicines category, with the penalties that follow. That line is crossed faster than people expect, often in a spoken sales pitch or a social media caption rather than on the label itself.<\/p>\n
This is where the UK genuinely differs from most of the European Union. Great Britain operates no general pre market notification scheme<\/strong> for ordinary food supplements: there is no register to file your label with before selling, unlike several EU member states. What does exist is the full weight of food law on the business that places the product on the market.<\/p>\n So if you resell a brand already on sale in Great Britain, you have nothing to notify. If you create your own brand under private label, or import directly from outside the UK, you become the business responsible for that product: composition within permitted limits, compliant labelling, a technical file you can produce on request, and liability if there is an enforcement visit or a recall.<\/p>\n The direct import trap<\/p>\n Buying an attractive batch abroad to resell it makes you the importer, and therefore the business responsible for placing it on the market: compliant labelling in English, permitted ingredients and forms, a substantiation file, traceability and liability in a recall. Note also that since Brexit, goods arriving from the European Union are imports rather than intra community movements. A saving of a few pounds per unit can become very expensive.<\/p>\n \n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n Even without being the business that placed the product on the market, a stockist is not merely a carrier. Four duties follow the goods.<\/p>\n Distance selling changes nothing in food law but stacks consumer law on top. The label’s mandatory particulars must be available before<\/strong> the purchase, on the product page itself. Add to that terms and conditions, full identification of the seller, and the fourteen day right to cancel that applies to distance sales to consumers.<\/p>\n The most commonly missed point is editorial content: a blog post or a product page promising a therapeutic effect is an unauthorised claim, even published in good faith. It is the single most frequent reason young online shops get a compliance letter.<\/p>\n No particular legal form is required. Sole trader, limited company, partnership: what matters is a registered business, registration of your food business with the local authority, proper invoicing and product liability insurance. That last one is not compulsory in every case, but on products people swallow, going without is a gamble.<\/p>\n Once the regulatory frame is clear, the question becomes commercial: which brand to put on your shelf. Reselling a brand already on the market spares you the whole burden of placing a product yourself, and lets you test your customers before tying up cash.<\/p>\n DIX is a French brand of sports supplements, selling direct to retailers, coaches, pharmacies and self employed practitioners. To compare supply routes before choosing, see our page on choosing a wholesaler or supplier of supplements<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe obligations that apply to you as a stockist<\/h2>\n
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Selling online: what gets added<\/h2>\n
Business status, the last point and the simplest<\/h2>\n
And then: finding the brand<\/h2>\n