Scientific consensus links dietary choices to health outcomes, highlighting the urgency to prioritise healthy food production in food systems. At the EU level, however, defining healthy food and integrating it into food governance remains a challenge, particularly regarding the inclusion of health-related characteristics in food safety assessments. While the EU primarily relies on the risk analysis principle to address food safety concerns, the process still exhibits weaknesses that hinder its direct impact on fostering a healthier food production landscape. This review demonstrates how the risk analysis process, particularly scientific opinions in risk assessment and external factors (economic and political) in risk management, impact food governance and the healthiness of food systems. We find that while external factors play a crucial role in risk management decisions by incorporating non-food safety considerations, they often stem from an imbalance of power favouring major industry and political stakeholders. This imbalance disproportionately influences decision-making, often overshadowing nutritional and health aspects. To address these challenges, we recommend directing research towards filling knowledge gaps and exploring minority scientific findings, and separating external factors from risk management’s decision-making process, to ensure that food governance prioritises public health and healthy food production.

Consumers are increasingly interested in the sustainability of food products, but so far, no specific European Union (EU) legislation has been developed to harmonise sustainability claims. We analyse which efforts already undertaken within the EU dealing with sustainability claims on products apply to sustainable food claims. We show that whilst sustainability can address three different dimensions (environmental, social and economic), it is crucial to clearly define sustainability in order to allow for the development of concrete regulations and guidance documents. EU legislative initiatives so far seem to be focused on environmental aspects, whilst Member States approach sustainability more broadly. At the same time, substantiation methods can only be successful when sustainability is well defined. We conclude that whilst there is a large range of initiatives taken at different levels, the foundation of these initiatives remains weak when there is no clear scope of terminology nor clarification of substantiation requirements. Currently existing self-regulatory initiatives could support protecting consumers from misleading claims by providing specific provisions for (food) business operators on how to make sustainability claims. Only when claims can be trusted and understood by consumers will they be able to make more sustainable purchase decisions. This plays an important role in the overall policy objective of the EU of climate neutrality by 2050.