Reference

Market access & commercial

Sensory panels, health-claim substantiation, REACH identity, feed additive authorisation, concept testing.

The cluster is about what stands between a product and its label claim. A trained sensory panel is an instrument assembled from people, with its own calibration and drift. A health claim is substantiable only if the substance can be defined, the effect measured, and the link between them demonstrated — that is how EFSA is built. Substance identity under REACH decides whether a fermentation-derived product inherits another molecule’s registration data. Feed-additive authorisation stands on two study designs. Focus groups and A/B tests measure what people say about buying, not what they buy — and the honest page keeps the two apart.

Start with health claim substantiation: the triad of definable substance, measurable effect and demonstrated link sets the rules for the whole cluster.

  • Consumer concept and A/B testing The inference problems in consumer research: hypothetical bias in stated preference, non-probability panels, the sample size an A/B test actually needs, and why looking at a running test breaks its error rate.
  • Feed additive authorisation The evidence behind feed additive dossiers: the tenfold tolerance study and its margin of safety, the consumer–user–environment triad, and why EU authorisation and US GRAS are structurally different objects.
  • Health claim substantiation Why most EU health claims fail: the characterisation requirement that defeats variable botanical extracts, the demand that an effect be a beneficial physiological function, and the population a study has to be run in.
  • Pre-approval access to investigational medicines The trade-offs behind expanded access and named-patient supply: uncontrolled data and confounding by indication, competition with trial recruitment, finite pre-approval supply, and how the absence of an alternative changes the risk calculus.
  • Substance identity under REACH Why REACH registration for bio-based chemicals turns on substance identity: mono-constituent versus UVCB, the thresholds that decide sameness, and how a different production route changes what a registration can borrow.
  • Sensory evaluation panels The measurement science behind sensory panels: why a discrimination test and a liking test answer different questions, how binomial statistics fix the panel size, and why adaptation and carryover force order balancing.
  • Biomass certification and chain of custody How chain-of-custody models work: physical segregation, mass-balance bookkeeping with yield factors, and book-and-claim certificates — and what each does and does not let a buyer assert about the molecule they hold.