Field note · September 2026

The FSVP Liability Sits With the Importer, Not the Brand

A foreign brand assumes that once its product clears customs, the food-safety burden has been handled somewhere upstream — by the factory, by a certification, by someone. On the US side, that assumption is wrong in a way that matters a great deal to whoever signs as importer of record. Under the Foreign Supplier Verification Program, it's the US importer — not the foreign manufacturer — who is legally required to verify that a supplier's food is being produced under conditions that meet US safety standards.

That means the party actually named on FDA warning letters, again and again in 2026's enforcement actions, isn't the factory overseas. It's the American company that imported the product without a functioning, product-specific verification program in place. FDA has been explicit that generic food-safety paperwork isn't sufficient — it wants FSVP-specific, product-linked verification, and it is rejecting importers who show up with the wrong kind of documentation.

For a lot of first-time importers, especially ones treating the role mostly as logistics — get the container here, clear it, hand it to the distributor — this liability is a surprise they discover only when an inspector asks for records that don't exist.

The importer of record isn't a shipping designation. It's the party FDA is going to hold responsible when something goes wrong.

What outsiders miss is that this makes the importer relationship a due-diligence decision for the foreign brand as well, not just an operational one. A brand whose importer has a real FSVP program in place is protected from the kind of disruption — a stalled shipment, a warning letter, a recall — that a cheaper, faster-talking importer with no compliance infrastructure can't actually promise to avoid.

That's what I check before I introduce anyone: not just who can move the container, but who can show a documented, product-specific FSVP that would survive an inspection. It's unglamorous groundwork, and it's exactly the thing that determines whether a brand's US launch survives its first year.

— Kumari Sikha Singh, on where I route between foreign brand and US importer