Importing Tea into the United States: FDA, FSVP and Customs

To import tea into the United States commercially you need four things in place: your supplier's facility registered with the FDA, a Prior Notice filed before the shipment arrives, a Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) that names you as the importer of record for food safety, and a customs entry that classifies the tea correctly. Three of those four are your responsibility, not your supplier's. This is the single biggest structural difference between US and EU tea importing, and it is where most first-time importers get caught.

The EU tests the tea. The US audits you.

In the EU, enforcement is largely analytical: your consignment is liable to be sampled at the border and measured against maximum residue levels set in Regulation (EC) 396/2005. Pass and it moves; fail and it is destroyed or re-exported. The tea is the object of scrutiny.

In the US, the Food Safety Modernization Act shifted the burden. Under FSVP, the FDA's primary question is not "is this lot compliant?" but "what system did the importer have in place to know it would be?" An FSVP inspection is an audit of your paperwork, usually conducted at your office, sometimes years after the tea was sold and drunk. You can have imported perfectly good tea and still be found in violation because you cannot produce the records.

Practically this means: the supplier documents you collect are not a formality to be filed and forgotten. They are the deliverable.

The four requirements, in order

1. FDA food facility registration

Any foreign facility that manufactures, processes, packs or holds food for consumption in the US must register with the FDA and must name a US agent. Registration is free. It carries a registration number, and it must be renewed in the last quarter of every even-numbered year — a lapsed registration is one of the more common causes of an otherwise clean shipment being refused.

Ask your supplier for the registration number and confirm the renewal cycle has been kept. A supplier who cannot answer this quickly has probably not shipped to the US recently.

2. Prior Notice

Prior Notice is an advance electronic filing telling the FDA what is arriving, from whom, and where. It is normally submitted by your customs broker through ACE alongside the entry. The submission windows differ by mode of transport, and ocean freight has the longest lead requirement. Getting this wrong holds the container at the port at your expense.

3. FSVP — the part that is genuinely yours

The Foreign Supplier Verification Program requires you to develop, maintain and follow a written programme for each foreign supplier and each food. For tea, a workable FSVP contains:

• A hazard analysis for the specific product — for tea, this is normally pesticide residues and heavy metals as chemical hazards, and foreign material as a physical hazard.
• An evaluation of the foreign supplier's performance and the risk posed by the food.
• Supplier verification activities matched to that risk — typically annual on-site audit, or lot-by-lot sampling and testing, or review of the supplier's own records.
• Corrective actions when a supplier fails.
• Re-evaluation at least every three years.
• Records, in English, retained at least two years, available to FDA on request.

You need a DUNS number to identify yourself as the FSVP importer at entry. The name and DUNS transmitted in ACE must be the entity that actually holds the FSVP records — a mismatch here is a finding on its own.

4. Pesticide tolerances: not the same numbers as the EU

In the US, the EPA sets pesticide tolerances and the FDA enforces them. The EU sets MRLs under a different regulation, on a different substance list, with different values. A lot that clears an EU multi-residue panel has not thereby been shown to meet US tolerances, and the reverse is equally true.

There is a further trap: where no US tolerance exists for a substance on tea, the default is zero, not "unregulated". A residue that sits comfortably under a permissive EU MRL can be a violation in the US simply because the substance was never tolerance-listed for tea.

When you brief a laboratory, specify the destination market. "Run a pesticide panel" is not a specification; "screen against US EPA tolerances for tea, report all detections including those without a listed tolerance" is.

Labelling for the US market

Country of origin marking is customs law rather than food law, and it is enforced separately. "Packed in" is not the same statement as "product of", and using the former where the latter is required is a marking violation.

Classification and duty

Tea is classified in Chapter 9 of the tariff schedule. The headings that matter are 0902.30 (black tea, fermented, in immediate packings of 3 kg or less), 0902.40 (black tea in larger packings), 0902.10 and 0902.20 for green tea in the same two size bands, and 2101.20 for instant tea extracts and preparations.

The three-kilogram threshold is a packaging fact, not a quality one — the same tea crosses between two headings purely on how it is packed. Decide the packing format before you ask for a duty estimate, not after.

What to ask your supplier for, in one list

1. FDA food facility registration number and confirmation of the current renewal.
2. The name and contact of their US agent.
3. A certificate of analysis per lot, with the laboratory named and the method stated — not a generic company-letterhead summary.
4. A pesticide report screened against US EPA tolerances for tea, reporting all detections.
5. The processing flow and the control points, in enough detail to support your hazard analysis.
6. The exporter of record's legal name — this is the entity that goes in your FSVP file, and at many Chinese producers it is a separate trading company from the producer.
7. Willingness to host an on-site audit, and the practical arrangements for it.

That last-but-one point catches people out. In Chinese agricultural export, the producing cooperative frequently does not hold import-export rights, so a trading company issues the invoice and the shipping documents. Your FSVP file has to name the foreign supplier accurately. Ask early; it is a normal structure, but it is not one you want to discover on the proforma invoice.

A realistic timeline for a first shipment

The FSVP work is the item most often started too late, and it is the only one on this list that does not compress under pressure. Start it while samples are still in transit.