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The European Union (EU) is committed to transitioning toward a circular economy model, with food waste being one of the areas to be targeted. To close the loop of food waste generated during food processing and discarded at the retail or consumption phases, research and innovation parties proposed to valorize agro-food by-products to produce novel foods and food improvement agents (food additives, food enzymes, and food flavorings). In the EU, the authorization of such novel foods and food improvement agents is governed by different regulatory frameworks. A centralized safety assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is the prerequisite for their authorization through the so-called Union Lists. Up to December 2023, EFSA published 45 scientific opinions on the safety of novel foods, food enzymes, and food additives derived from by-products of plant and animal origin. The current study illustrates examples of these by-products for the production of novel foods or food improvement agents and the data requirements behind their respective safety assessments conducted by EFSA. In this review, applications on novel foods, food enzymes, and food additives received by EFSA were screened and analyzed to find the common scientific requirements and differences in terms of the safety evaluation of such products. Various by-products (i.e., corncobs, coffee husks, spent grains of barley and rice, grape pomace, pumpkin peels, bovine whey, eggshells, shrimp heads, and animal organs or tissues) were described in the applications as being processed (extraction, physical treatments, and chemical and enzymatic reactions) to obtain novel foods and food improvement agents. The heterogeneity and complexity of these products emphasize the challenge of their safety assessment, depending on the characteristics of each product. However, as this study shows, the scientific requirements underpinning their safety do not differ substantially in the different regulated product areas considered, with similar information needed to assess their safety in terms of identity, production process, compositional characterization, proposed/intended uses and exposure assessment, toxicological information, and allergenicity data. Additional nutritional information and data on the history of use are required in the case of novel foods.

Investigating the impact of diet on public health using risk–benefit assessment (RBA) methods that simultaneously consider both beneficial and adverse health outcomes could be useful for shaping dietary policies and guidelines. In the field of food safety and nutrition, RBA is a relatively new approach facing methodological challenges and being subject to further developments. One of the methodological aspects calling for improvement is the selection of components to be considered in the assessment, currently based mainly on non-harmonized unstandardized experts’ judgment. Our aim was to develop a harmonized, transparent, and documented methodological framework for selecting nutritional, microbiological, and toxicological RBA components. The approach was developed under the Novel foods as red meat replacers—an insight using Risk-Benefit Assessment methods (NovRBA) case study, which attempted to estimate the overall health impact of replacing red meat with an edible insect species, Acheta domesticus. Starting from the compositional profiles of both food items, we created a “long list” of food components. By subsequently applying a series of predefined criteria, we proceeded from the “long” to the “short list.” These criteria were established based on the occurrence and severity of health outcomes related to these components. For nutrition and microbiology, the occurrence of health outcomes was evaluated considering the presence of a component in the raw material, as well as the effect of processing on the respective component. Regarding toxicology, the presence and exposure relative to reference doses and the contribution to total exposure were considered. Severity was graded with the potential contribution to the background diet alongside bioavailability aspects (nutrition), the disability-adjusted life years per case of illness of each hazard (microbiology), and disease incidence in the population, potential fatality, and lifelong disability (toxicology). To develop the “final list” of components, the “short list” was refined by considering the availability and quality of data for a feasible inclusion in the RBA model. The methodology developed can be broadly used in food RBA, to guide and reinforce a harmonized selection of nutritional, microbiological, and toxicological components and will contribute to facilitating RBA implementation, enabling the generation of transparent, robust, and comparable outcomes.

Risk-benefit Assessment (RBA) is an emerging methodology in the area of Food and Nutrition that offers a simultaneous evaluation of both risks and benefits linked to dietary choices. Communication of such research to consumers may present a challenge due to the dual nature of RBA. We present a case study of a communication strategy developed for the NovRBA-project. The NovRBA-project (Novel foods as red meat replacers—an insight using Risk Benefit Assessment methods) performed a risk-benefit assessment to evaluate the overall health impact of substituting red meat (beef) by a novel food (house cricket), considering the microbial, toxicological and nutritional characteristics of the respective dietary choices. A literature review of risk perceptions and acceptance of beef and insects as food formed the basis of the communication strategy for the study's results, drawing on environmental and emotional as well as health-related motivations to consume or avoid either food and considering the sociodemographic characteristics of likely consumers. Challenges and future directions for consumer protection organizations communicating findings of risk-benefit analyses on food safety are discussed.