On June 18, 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its proposed method for ranking chemicals in food supply for public comments.  

“This method provides a transparent, systematic, and science-based approach to determine which chemicals the agency would prioritize for post-market assessments through the agency’s post-market chemical review program,” FDA said in a statement. “It will allow the FDA to allocate resources more efficiently, ensuring that the agency focuses on food chemicals that may present the greatest potential public health risk, including risk to sensitive populations, and are of high public concern.” 

The method released on June 18 uses Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to determine a score for each chemical based on evaluating the information about a chemical against a pre-determined set of criteria, says the FDA.  

“The method is similar in approach and criteria to one that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency uses for prioritizing chemicals, but the FDA’s method takes into account factors specific to exposure from food and uses a scoring method similar to the FDA’s Risk Ranking Model for Traceability,” FDA said. 

The FDA encourages the public to comment in docket FDA-2025-N-1733 in response to the questions listed in Section 4 of the method description document. The last day to submit comments on the method is July 18, 2025.  

For more information, visit the FDA website.