Today, FDA’s Human Foods Program (HFP) released its 2025 Priority Deliverables, which highlights activities the HFP plans to focus on during its first year following a reorganization of the program’s design and responsibilities that went into effect on October 1, 2024. These priority deliverables are being shared while the HFP works on a more comprehensive multi-year strategic plan to advance its vision and mission.
To meet its public health mission and vision the HFP centralized its risk management activities into three main areas:
- Microbiological Food Safety: Advancing strategies to prevent pathogen-related foodborne illness in close collaboration with other regulatory agencies, states, industry, and other stakeholders.
- Food Chemical Safety: Ensuring that exposure to chemicals, including both additives and contaminants, that occur in foods is safe, advancing dietary supplement safety, and supporting and effectively regulating food ingredient innovation.
- Nutrition: Elevating and empowering action on nutrition science, policy, and initiatives to help reduce the burden of diet-related chronic diseases, improve health equity, and ensure the nutritional adequacy and safety of infant formula.
For each risk management area, the priority deliverables are intended to strengthen regulatory oversight and promote priority policy initiatives, advance the science needed to inform the agency’s decision-making, and better leverage partnerships and engagement to help achieve the HFP’s public health mission. The FDA intends to provide periodic updates on progress made on these items.
While the HFP was officially established on October 1, 2024, work continues to fully operationalize the program, particularly in the areas of enhanced risk modeling, laboratory integration, regulatory workforce development, and performance management. The design of the HFP streamlines operations and unifies all FDA food functions, personnel, and resources that are programmatic in nature under the leadership of the Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods.
The reorganization which created the Human Foods Program took effect on October 1, 2024, and is the single largest reorganization in the FDA’s modern history. Establishment of the Human Foods Program will help the FDA deliver on its mission to protect and promote public health through science-based approaches aimed at preventing foodborne illness, reducing diet-related chronic disease, and ensuring the safety of chemicals in food.