Notification of food-related activities

A notification must be made of professional operation in the food industry.

A notification must be made of any indoor or outdoor space or a part thereof in which food meant for sale is

• stored
• transported
• marketed
• served
• handled.

A notification must be made of the following:

• food premises such as restaurants, shops or bakeries
• food transports
• mobile food premises such as food trucks
• virtual rooms such as those involved in the online sale of food.

No notification is required for the primary production of food. In contrast, food premises that process foodstuffs of animal origin before retail must apply to be approved as establishments.

Submit a notification via the ilppa notification e-service of the Finnish Food Authority.

You can submit the notification also in writing to the food control authority of the municipality in which you are located.

Include the following details in the notification:

• the name and contact details of your company and your municipality of residence if you have a mobile food premises or a virtual room
• your company’s business ID, or if you do not have one, your personal identity code
• the name and contact details of your food premises or virtual room
• the visiting address and municipality of your food premises, if it is not a mobile food premises
• description of the operation and its estimated extent
• the estimated time of starting the operation
• a description of your self-monitoring system.

The authority will inform you once it has entered the information included in your notification into its register. The authority will also carry out an inspection to see how you implement your self-monitoring system within 1–6 months of the start of the operation.

Before commencing operations, submit a notification in accordance with the Food Act primarily through the ilppa online service (see e-services). Attach at least a floor plan to your food-related activities report.

If you submit the notification in another way than in the ilppa online service, deliver the appendices separately to environmental health care by email, by post or by bringing them to the Rovakaari environmental health care’s office.

Case process:

1 The notification arrives at environmental health care, where a supervisor reads it. The supervisor checks that the information is sufficient to register the item and asks you for more information if necessary.

2 The activities you report are registered and the supervisory unit sends a certificate of processing the notification which is subject to a fee. If you submitted the notification in ilppa, you will see the details of the location your notification concerns and any changes made to it after it is processed. You will also see details of the activities you have previously reported.

You should also primarily use the ilppa online service to submit a notification if the activities change essentially or end. You can also submit the notification by email or by post to the Rovakaari environmental health care. No fee is charged for processing notifications of interruption or cessation of activitie, nor will you receive a separate certificate for their processing.

A prerequisite for starting operations is that the food-related activities fulfil the requirements of the Food Act. For example, the food-related activities must not cause danger to human health.

In addition to reporting the start of operations, the operator must notify the relevant authority if

• the operation changes
• the operation is suspended
• the operation is terminated
• the operator changes.

If the operator is established in another state in the European Economic Area and is operating temporarily in Finland, the operator does not need to submit a notification in Finland if it has already submitted a notification of food-related activities in its home country. Temporary activity means less than six months of activity per year.

The notification obligation applies equally to private and public operators.

Before submitting a notification in the ilppa system, you will need a Suomi.fi e-Authorization for the company (concerns public operators as well) for which you want to submit a notification.

Private entrepreneurs or company signatories can log in to the ilppa application directly with Suomi.fi e-Identification, i.e., an official representative of a company. An official representative of a company is a person who has been included in the Trade Register or the Business Information System (BIS) with an institutional role in the company or organisation in question. Other users of ilppa need a mandate the company’s official representative has granted in the Suomi.fi service. Mandates are granted and applied for in the Suomi.fi service.

You always need a personal token for identification in Suomi.fi e-Authorizations and ilppa. For that, you need a banking ID, certificate card or mobile certificate, for example.