Overview
Commission Recommendation (EU) 2024/907, adopted 22 March 2024 and published in the Official Journal L series on 26 March 2024, directs European Union Member States to monitor the presence of nickel in food. It is a non-binding Commission act (Article 292 TFEU) that operationalises the regulatory response to the European Food Safety Authority’s 2020 nickel risk assessment, and it is the precursor and companion monitoring instrument to the EU’s nickel maximum levels. Those binding levels were set four months later, by Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 of 30 July 2024, which inserted nickel as Annex I point 3.6 of Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915 (applying from 1 July 2025; 1 July 2026 for cereals). Signed by Commissioner Stella Kyriakides.
The scientific basis the Commission cited (recital 6)
The recommendation recites the European Food Safety Authority’s conclusions verbatim, drawing on the EFSA 2020 update of the nickel risk assessment (adopted 24 September 2020):
- On the basis of the critical chronic effect of pregnancy loss, a tolerable daily intake (TDI) of 13 µg Ni/kg body weight was established.
- The TDI is exceeded in toddlers, in children between 36 months and 10 years old, and also, in some cases, in infants. Even though pregnancy loss is not a relevant effect for the young age groups, the TDI is also protective for other relevant effects such as neurotoxic effects, so the Commission concludes the exceedance “may raise health concerns in these age groups.”
- The critical acute effect is eczematous flare-up reactions in the skin elicited in nickel-sensitised humans, “which concerns about 15 % of the population.” The lowest-observed-adverse-effect level for this effect is 4.3 µg nickel/kg bw, and a margin of exposure of 30 or higher is needed to protect against it. That margin “is not achieved for the mean and 95th percentile exposure, which raises a health concern for nickel sensitised individuals.”
This is the EU’s own statement, in a signed legal act, that current dietary nickel exposure already breaches both the chronic tolerable intake (in children) and the acute protective margin (for the sensitised population).
What it directs (operative recommendations)
Member States, in collaboration with food business operators, should monitor nickel in food during 2025, 2026 and 2027, and the monitoring should include:
food supplements, chocolate, chocolate spreads, nut spreads, cocoa beans, cereal-based products (in particular breakfast cereals, cereal flakes and oat milling products), ready-to-eat soups, coffee, tea, vegetables, seaweeds, oilseeds, soy-based products such as tofu and soy-based drinks, pulses, nuts, fish and other seafood.
Member States are also recommended to gather knowledge on mitigation measures for reducing nickel levels in food, ensure those measures are communicated to and implemented by farmers and operators, follow the sampling/analysis methods in Regulation (EC) No 333/2007, and report monitoring data to EFSA for compilation into a single database (specifying cocoa-solids content for chocolate, tea type/species, and seaweed species).
Why maximum levels did not cover every food (recital 8)
The recommendation notes that for some foods that are relevant contributors to nickel exposure, occurrence data were insufficient to determine appropriate maximum levels, so further monitoring is needed. In particular, to establish the contribution of different fish and seafood species to the nickel content of baby food, the fish and seafood used to manufacture such food should be monitored. This is the EU stating, on the record, that its nickel regulation is a work in progress that it intends to extend as the monitoring data arrive.
Relevance to the Heavy Metal Index
This is a primary, citable instrument for the proposition that the European Union is actively regulating and surveilling nickel in food, naming the specific high-nickel categories the wiki already tracks (cocoa and chocolate, oats and cereals, tea, soy, pulses, nuts, seafood). It is the regulatory counterpart to Nickel and the downstream policy uptake of EFSA 2020. The binding maximum levels themselves were set by Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 and are recorded under Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 — maximum levels of nickel in certain foodstuffs and EU Regulation 2023/915 maximum levels for contaminants in food.
Provenance note on the maximum-level instrument (resolved 2026-06-22)
Recital 7 of this recommendation states that nickel maximum levels “have been established for nickel in various foods in Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915.” That quote is verbatim and accurate, but the present-perfect tense is anachronistic relative to this March-2024 recommendation: the binding levels were not actually inserted into Annex I to 2023/915 until Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 of 30 July 2024 (OJ L, 31.7.2024), four months later. The recommendation and the amending regulation were drafted as a single package, which is why the recital reads as though the levels already existed.
The earlier open item — confirming the amending instrument against the Official Journal — is now resolved. The full primary OJ text of Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 has been ingested as Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1987 of 30 July 2024 amending Regulation (EU) 2023/915 as regards maximum levels of nickel in certain foodstuffs (raw PDF hashed; complete Annex I point 3.6 transcribed; application dates 1 July 2025, and 1 July 2026 for cereals). Both the existence of EU nickel food maximum levels and the exact amending-regulation citation, values, and dates are now primary-confirmed.
Verification notes
Ingested 2026-06-03 from the Official Journal PDF supplied at raw/Manual Fetch Kimi /June 3 Folder/OJ_L_202400907_EN_TXT.pdf (sha256 c88ecf52…), read in full (2 pages, recitals 1–9 and operative recommendations 1–5). Quotations above are verbatim from the OJ text. ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/reco/2024/907/oj.
Update history
This page has no substantive edit history yet. Future revisions will be recorded here once the change lands in git.