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October 2026

US Lacey Act: Import Declaration for Plant Products

In 2023 and 2024, US Customs and Border Protection stepped up seizures of imported wood products with incomplete or inaccurate Lacey Act declarations — including multiple container-loads of hardwood flooring and furniture from Southeast Asia. CBP's enforcement focus has shifted from high-profile criminal prosecutions to routine port-level verification: if the species, country of harvest, or quantity on your PPQ 505 form does not match the shipment, the goods are detained, and the importer of record bears the cost of storage, re-export, or destruction.

The US Lacey Act (16 U.S.C. §§ 3371–3378) was originally enacted in 1900 to combat wildlife trafficking. The 2008 amendment extended it to plants and plant products, creating a mandatory import declaration regime that covers an enormous range of goods — from raw timber to finished furniture, paper, and musical instruments. On the Sustalium platform, we see Lacey Act declarations becoming a more frequent request in the furniture and construction materials supply chains, as US retailers strengthen their import compliance programs.

FDA Food Contact Material: Compliance Guide

In 2023, the FDA issued warning letters to multiple manufacturers of food contact articles — including a major manufacturer of reusable plastic food containers — for failing to provide adequate documentation that their food contact substances were approved for their intended use. The common thread in all the letters: the companies had test data showing their products were safe, but they could not produce a properly structured Declaration of Compliance that mapped each substance in the material to its regulatory clearance. The FDA's position was unambiguous: data without a properly structured declaration is not compliance documentation.

Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) and 21 CFR Parts 170–199, any material intended to contact food during manufacturing, packaging, storage, or preparation must be approved by the FDA or be Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). The manufacturer or supplier issues a Declaration of Compliance (DoC) — a self-declared document that certifies the material meets FDA regulatory requirements. On the Sustalium platform, food-contact declarations are one of the most cross-referenced document types we see: a food packaging supplier issues a Declaration of Compliance to its downstream customer, who must then present it to their own buyer or retailer audit.

Selling Food Online in the US: The Rules You Need

You have a recipe people love. You want to turn it into a product. Maybe it is candy, hot sauce, granola, or frozen meals. The part most first-time food entrepreneurs underestimate is not the recipe — it is everything that happens after the recipe is finalized. Commercial production, food safety regulation, packaging compliance, labeling, shelf-life testing, and distribution.

This guide walks through the end-to-end process of launching a food product in the United States, with the compliance obligations woven in at the stage where they actually apply — not as a separate document you deal with later.

On the Sustalium platform, the compliance document most first-time food entrepreneurs are missing is not the FDA registration or the food safety plan — it is the Declaration of Compliance for their packaging. They have the food safety documentation. They do not have the food contact material compliance. And when a retailer or Amazon asks for it, the gap stops the launch.

Not sure which regulations apply to your food product? Use the Sustalium Global Compliance Map — select your product category and target country, and see every regulatory framework that applies, from FDA food safety to state-level packaging rules.

SMETA Audit Guide: Sedex Social Compliance

Sedex reports over 75,000 members across 180 countries, with more than 340,000 SMETA audits conducted globally. The most common non-compliance findings — working hours, wages below the legal minimum, and inadequate health and safety controls — appear consistently across the textile, electronics, and agriculture sectors. Under the UK Modern Slavery Act, brands like Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Unilever, and Primark explicitly cite SMETA audit programs in their public modern slavery statements, and the EU's CSDDD now extends similar due diligence obligations across the entire bloc. For a supplier, a lapsed or missing SMETA report increasingly means automated deselection from buyer procurement systems — often before a human reviewer ever sees the application.

SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) is the most widely used social compliance audit methodology in the world. It assesses working conditions across labor standards, health and safety, environmental management, and business ethics. For suppliers in apparel, textiles, electronics, furniture, and FMCG, a current SMETA audit report is often the price of admission to the Western buyer market. On the Sustalium platform, we see the same buyer who requests a CE Declaration of Conformity now routinely asking for the most recent social audit — because procurement teams are being measured on supply chain risk, not just product compliance.

US vs. EU Food Contact: One Product, Two Frameworks

A food packaging product sold in both the United States and the European Union must satisfy two separate food contact regulatory regimes — and neither accepts the other's documentation. The FDA Declaration of Compliance cites 21 CFR regulations and Food Contact Notifications. The EU Declaration of Compliance cites Regulation (EC) 1935/2004 and material-specific measures like the Plastics Regulation (EU) 10/2011. The migration testing is similar but the test conditions, simulants, and limits differ. And a Declaration of Compliance valid in one market is not valid in the other.

This guide compares the two systems, identifies the key operational differences, and explains how to build dual-market food contact compliance without duplicating every test.

French Duty of Vigilance: LdV Supply Chain Law

Since the French Duty of Vigilance Law came into force in 2017, NGOs and affected communities have filed multiple high-profile lawsuits — against TotalEnergies over its Tilenga oil project in Uganda and Tanzania, against EDF over a wind farm affecting indigenous communities in Mexico, and against BNP Paribas over fossil fuel financing. In 2023 alone, four new LdV cases were filed in French courts. None resulted in an operational suspension order, but each forced the defendant company to publicly disclose and — in some cases — substantially revise its vigilance plan. The law is no longer a dormant obligation. It is being actively litigated.

The French Duty of Vigilance Law (Loi de Vigilance — LdV, Law No. 2017-399) was the first mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence law in Europe. It requires large French companies to establish, publish, and implement a vigilance plan covering their own operations, those of their subsidiaries, and those of their suppliers and subcontractors. On the Sustalium platform, we now hear from French procurement teams asking suppliers to provide structured ESG and supply chain data specifically to feed into the parent company's vigilance plan — and if a supplier cannot produce the data, they get replaced.

Supplier Onboarding Compliance Software

Manually onboarding a new supplier means chasing emails, verifying certificates one by one, re-entering data into spreadsheets, and hoping nothing slips through the cracks. It is slow, error-prone, and scales poorly. Supplier onboarding compliance software solves this by replacing manual workflows with automated data collection, risk scoring, and document verification — all in one place.

US Apparel Compliance: Flammability, Labeling & Rules

Apparel compliance in the United States is deceptively fragmented. The federal requirements are relatively minimal — a flammability standard, a fiber content label, and a country of origin marking. But state-level obligations — California's Proposition 65, the emerging NY Fashion Act, PFAS restrictions across multiple states, and packaging heavy metal rules — add layers of compliance that many apparel importers discover only at the point of enforcement.

This guide maps every US compliance requirement for apparel and textiles, from the federal baseline through the state-level obligations that increasingly define market access.

FSC Chain of Custody Certification Software

If you buy or sell FSC-certified materials, you know the administrative burden of collecting, verifying, and sharing certificates. Buyers demand proof before every transaction, suppliers scramble to find the latest PDF, and someone on your team manually checks expiry dates and scope codes. This process breaks down as soon as you handle more than a handful of certifications — and a single lapse can cost you a sale or put your own chain of custody at risk.

ISO 27001 Certification: ISMS & Buyer Sharing

As of the ISO Survey 2023, there were 71,549 valid ISO 27001 certificates across 175 countries — making it the second most adopted ISO management system standard after ISO 9001. In a 2024 Vanta survey, 78% of companies reported that ISO 27001 certification directly helped them close deals faster. The transition from ISO 27001:2013 to ISO 27001:2022 completed in October 2025, and any organization still holding a certificate against the 2013 version must now recertify against the updated standard. The market message is unambiguous: in B2B procurement, ISO 27001 has become less a security posture indicator and more a market access prerequisite.

ISO 27001 is the international standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). For B2B companies — SaaS platforms, IT service providers, cloud infrastructure companies, and any organization handling client data — it is the single most requested compliance credential in vendor assessments. On the Sustalium platform, we see the real bottleneck is rarely the technical controls themselves — it is the inability to produce the certificate, Statement of Applicability, and audit reports in a single verifiable package when procurement asks for them.