New homepage

In response of the update of the homepage of the Foodsafetyportal there was a comment that this design made it more difficult to find the tools. It was therefore decided to go back to the design with a series of tiles for the topics and others for the tools in the header of the first page. These tiles have a slightly different format than the previous versions; they are converted into buttons. This includes the information that was previously available in the Archive. The content of the homepage was included in the page called "Portal" as it is intended to be a general introduction to this Foodsafetyportal.
Its version number is updated into V18.0.

Intake Limit Value

Another change is the introduction of a new parameter in the calculation tools. It is called the "Intake Limit Value (ILV)". In the tools the intake of a chemical substance through foods was tested on different ways; the test depends on the type of toxicological limits being HBGVs, or BMDLs, or slope factors. These different tests make the calculation programs rather complicated and prone for errors. It was decided to create a new toxicological limit value: the ILV. The HBGVs and BMDLs and slope factors are now transformed into the ILV using the Margin of Exposure, eliminating the differences between the toxicological limits. If the ratio between the intake and the ILV is greater than 1 for all limits, there is a potential health risk. More details are provided under the topic of "Limit of Rejection and other limit values..." in this portal. The EAST, and XI and ImproRisk (now GIFTT) calculation tools are updated accordingly.

Cancer risk

To better understand the details of the slope factor in the exposure assessment's calculations, the "Risk calculation" in the topic of "Cancer" is updated with more details about the method of linear extrapolation of results of cancer studies.

GIFTT

In the previous versions it was possible to calculate intake of chemical substances from foods for individual consumers in the Netherlands (XI) and in Cyprus (ImproRisk). This is possible as food consumption data of individual consumers for these two countries are made public available for download. Later it became clear hat such data also exist for many other countries in the world in the Global Individual Food Consumption Data Tool (GIFT) of FAO and WHO. More details on this data tool is presented under the new topic "GIFTT in this portal. It must however be noted that only a small number of surveys of European countries are made available. Many European countries are not yet included in GIFT. It seems that these countries keep their data confidential, or that they do not want to share the surveys with other people. So, intake calculations for individual consumers for many European countries are not possible, and independent checks of such studies (see for example the EFSA Opinions) is therefore also impossible. From a scientific point of view this position can not be understood.
The basic structure of XI and ImproRisk is copied into a new tool GIFTT that uses the data sets of GIFT. In this tool one first selects a food consumption survey from GIFT. It is now made possible to selected more than one foods. Then there are three methods to calculate the intake: (1) is by providing a single concentration, or (2) by a series of concentrations, or (3) by providing a series of concentrations and a number of repetitions. The third method is actually a Monte Carlo analysis. The output shows the variation of intake for all subjects and for consumers only, and reports the number of consumers exceeding the ILV of the chemical substance. The intakes of all individual consumers are also provided as file with comma-separated values that can be imported in spreadsheets and statistical programs.

Update of Regulation 2023/915

The database with MRLs and MLs is updated with the MLs for inorganic arsenic in fish and other seafood, according to Commission Regulation 2025/1891 of 17 September 2025. With these standards the database for Regulation 2023/915 is in line with the current consolidated version of 8 October 2025.