The Food & Feed Omnibus proposal challenged before the EU Ombudsman
Foodwatch International lodged a complaint against the EU Commission, alleging serious procedural failures in how the Commission prepared one of its most consequential legislative packages of the year.
The package proposes amendments to ten food safety regulations at once, relaxing pesticide authorisations’ procedures, residue limits, biocide assessments, BSE monitoring, feed additives, and border controls on food imports. Foodwatch argues this proposal was rushed through without a meaningful impact assessment, without adequate public consultation, and without any clear rationale for bundling these ten distinct regulatory areas into a single proposal. The procedural failures are striking. The Commission’s only pre-legislative consultation amounted to a 1.5-page call for evidence with a four-week window. Over 6,440 comments were submitted. Two months later, the Commission published its proposals. An independent legal opinion commissioned by Foodwatch concluded in January 2026 that the absence of an impact assessment infringes the principles of proportionality, equal treatment, and legitimate expectations.
History Repeating
This is not the first time the Commission has faced this kind of scrutiny. In November 2025, the European Ombudswoman found that the Commission had committed maladministration in the preparation of three urgent legislative proposals, including the corporate sustainability due diligence Omnibus (Omnibus I), the Common Agricultural Policy reform, and the anti-migrant-smuggling legislation. In that case, the Ombudswoman found that the Commission had, among other things, reduced inter-departmental consultation to less than 24 hours over a weekend for Omnibus I, and failed to carry out or document a climate consistency assessment. She issued clear recommendations to ensure that future urgent legislative processes remain transparent, evidence-based, and inclusive. The Food and Feed Safety Omnibus suggests those recommendations have not been heeded.
As The Good Lobby’s founder, Prof Alberto Alemanno, put it: “Another legal challenge to the EU deregulation agenda. If it succeeds, it will prove what we’ve been saying all along: the Omnibus doesn’t simplify EU law – it rewrites it.”
The Commission has justified the entire Omnibus programme under the banner of simplification and competitiveness, and the German Chancellor Merz together with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, recently called for more Omnibus proposals in an attempt at “de-bureaucratising the EU.” But simplification is not a blank cheque to bypass the procedural safeguards that give EU legislation its legitimacy. Impact assessments and public consultations are not bureaucratic formalities – they are the mechanisms through which health, environmental, and democratic considerations enter the law-making process.
What Happens Next
foodwatch is calling on the Ombudswoman to investigate and is asking that the Commission withdraw the current proposal and suspend inter-institutional negotiations until a full impact assessment and meaningful public consultation have been completed. The Council has already agreed its position on parts of the package, making the urgency of this complaint all the more acute.
The Good Lobby will continue to follow this case closely. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore: the Omnibus process is a stress test for the EU’s commitment to its own standards of good governance, and its own adherence to the rule of law