EU Health claims Food check — check your product page free

A demo product page for a Dutch food-supplement shop returned 24 findings — 13 of them outright prohibitions — when I ran it through the 19 rules of EU Health Claim Lint, a VS Code extension for people who maintain EU food and drink storefronts.

The page was not unusual. It sold a fourteen-day bundle: a cold-pressed juice, a jar of honey, a box of capsules. The copy said the bundle would boost your immune system and cleanse your body. It promised a daily detox that flushes out toxins. It said lose 4 kg in 14 days. It called the formula a superfood, recommended by nutritionists, clinically proven. That is ordinary e-commerce English, and almost every sentence of it is a finding under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006.

Here is why it needs a linter rather than a careful read. The regulation does not work by banning a list of bad words. It works the other way round: Article 10(1) says a health claim may be made only if it appears in the Union Register of authorised claims, in the wording that was authorised. So detox is not forbidden because someone ruled against detox; it is forbidden because there is no entry for it, for any food or botanical. Boosts your immune system fails the same way, and the authorised wording sitting in its place is contributes to the normal function of the immune system — usable only where the nutrient reaches 15 % of the NRV. A phrase can be true, popular and entirely unlawful at once, and nothing in the sentence tells you which.

That is the shape of problem a generative model gets wrong. Ask a chatbot for a vitamin C product page and it writes what it has read, which is a decade of food marketing rather than the Register. It gives you immunity boosting. It does not know Article 12(b) prohibits any claim about the rate or amount of weight loss, so lose 4 kg in 14 days has to go in full, figure and timescale together, nor that Article 12(c) rules out a recommendation by an individual doctor or nutritionist.

Then the dates, which is where this got urgent. Directive (EU) 2024/1438 revised the honey, fruit juice and jam labelling rules, and they have applied in full since 14 June 2026. A honey blend can no longer be described as a blend of EU and non-EU honeys; every country of origin must be named, in descending order of weight. Extra jam needs its 45 g of fruit per 100 g stated. Stock labelled before that date may be sold until it runs out — and that grace is the trap, because a product page is not stock. Nothing on it runs out. It sits there, indexed, until somebody complains.

The rest is arithmetic the copywriter never sees. The Annex to 1924/2006 ties each nutrition claim to a figure: low fat 3 g per 100 g, fat-free 0.5 g, low sugars 5 g, sugars-free 0.5 g, high protein 20 % of energy, source of fibre 3 g, high fibre 6 g, low sodium 0.12 g. Source of a vitamin means 15 % of the NRV; high in means 30 %. The linter does not guess your recipe — it checks whether the figure appears where a reader or an inspector would look.

Supplements carry three more sentences under Article 6(3) of Directive 2002/46/EC: not a substitute for a varied diet, do not exceed the recommended daily dose, keep out of the reach of young children. The demo page had none of them.

The two fixtures are the whole measure. The clean page — a protein bar with its per-100 g table, its 37 % NRV figure and its varied-and-balanced-diet statement — returns zero findings. The dirty page returns 24, across 16 of the 19 rules. A linter that fires on a compliant page is worse than none, so that zero matters as much as the 24.

Checking the file you have open is free and finished: all 19 rules, every article, no key. The paid layer moves on a different axis — it sweeps every page in the workspace and exports a dated per-SKU dossier in Markdown and CSV that you keep and hand to a lawyer or an authority. A food-law consultant reviewing the same copy bills roughly $200 an hour.