EC identification and health marks

Identification marks and health marks are the oval-shaped markings found on food products of animal origin in the European Community, required by European Union food safety regulations. It identifies the processing establishment that produced and packaged the product and that is therefore responsible for its hygiene status. These marks are meant as a monitoring and tracking aid for food safety and customs inspectors, and each food processing facility dealing with food products of animal origin is required to keep records of its trading partners and their approval numbers, both for buying and selling. The identification and health marks are not an indication for the specific origin of a particular piece of food by themselves, as they do not encode the location of the farm that provided the initial raw product or livestock.

Regulations

The European Union has multiple regulations regarding food safety and quality control in the food industry. These are:

the EC/852/2004 regulation, regarding general food safety,
the EC/853/2004 regulation, regarding processing and trading of food products of animal origin, and
the EC/854/2004 regulation, regarding the veterinary and laboratory examination of livestock and meat products.

The EC/853/2004 regulation defines the identification mark, and the EC/854/2004 regulation defines the health mark. The former is in effect only when there is no need for the latter, though they use essentially the same marking style.

Meaning

The identification and health marks contains the following information in an oval:

the name of the country in which the product was processed, or more commonly a modified version of the corresponding ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. UK may be used for products processed in Northern Ireland post-Brexit;
the national approval number of the facility where the food was processed ;
the letters EC for European Community, or their equivalents in other EU languages, but only if the source materials were produced in/imported from another EC member state.

Examples

An example of a simple identification mark:

HU
260
EK

Where HU is the country code for Hungary, 260 is the national approval number of a processing facility, and EK stands for Európai Közösség.
Another example with a more complex national approval number:

FR
49.099.001
CE

Where FR is the country code for France, 49.099.001 is a complex national approval number, which encodes some geographic data about the facility, and CE stands for Communauté européenne.