EU approved food establishment lists: how equipment suppliers find food and beverage plants

Under Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, establishments preparing food must be registered in each member state. Some establishments, mainly those handling products of animal origin covered by Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, must also be approved by the competent authority. Member states must keep their lists of approved establishments up to date in TRACES, the Commission's system, under Article 45(1)(a) of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1715.[4]

Approval is the narrower group. A slaughterhouse, cutting plant, dairy or fish processor is usually on an approved list. A brewery, distillery or soft-drinks plant that handles no products of animal origin is registered, not approved, so you will not find it on these lists. The Commission's technical specifications also allow some establishments that do not need approval to be listed voluntarily, so a listing does not always mean approval was required.[4]

The HSE list we opened on 27 October 2026 was marked "Last refreshed on 27/10/2026".[6] Record the refresh date of every list you use, because sites are added, suspended and withdrawn.

The Commission's technical specifications set out a model layout for national lists. The columns are approval number, name, town or region, category, associated activities, species and remarks.[4] Countries do not all follow it exactly. The specifications are recommendations, so layouts and codes vary.[4]

• Section groups establishments by food type, following Annex III to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004. Examples are Section I (meat of domestic ungulates), Section VI (meat products), Section VIII (fishery products), Section IX (raw milk and dairy products) and Section X (eggs and egg products).[4]
• Category describes the kind of establishment. For example, CP is a cutting plant, CS a cold store and EPC an egg packing centre.[4]
• Species codes show which animals are handled, for example A for poultry, B for bovine and O for ovine.[4]
• Address detail varies. The model layout asks only for a town or region,[4] while the Irish HSE list includes an address and county.[6]

• Plants with no animal-origin products. Most beverage plants and many other food plants are registered, not approved.
• Size. No list we checked gives employee numbers or turnover.
• Equipment or processes beyond the activity and category codes.
• Contacts. Rows name the establishment, not the people who run or buy for it.
• The parent group. A row names the approved operator or trading name, which may belong to a larger group.
• Buying intent. Approval is a regulatory status, not a sign of a project or a need.

Breweries, distilleries, soft-drinks plants and other plants that handle no products of animal origin are not on approved lists. The largest of them, and the largest animal-product plants, usually need an industrial emissions permit instead, and those permits are public.

Annex I of the Industrial Emissions Directive covers food and drink installations above set capacities:[10]

Plants processing both animal and vegetable materials have a sliding threshold that depends on the share of animal material.[10]

Two places to look:

• Across the EU, the EEA's Industrial Emissions Portal lists installations reported under the directive, with the operator, location and activity.[11]
• In Ireland, the EPA's LEAP portal holds industrial emissions licences and the documents behind them, which describe the processes on site.[12]

A permit is strong evidence of a large plant, because the thresholds are about capacity. Plants below the thresholds that are registered but not approved have to be found through company records and the operators' own material.

Approved lists name sites. Official statistics count enterprises. Eurostat's structural business statistics give the scale of the market. In 2024 the EU-27 had 273,223 enterprises in food manufacturing (NACE C10), of which 2,424 had 250 or more persons employed. Beverage manufacturing (C11) had 35,889 enterprises.[8][9]

Source: Eurostat sbs_ovw_act and sbs_sc_ovw, reference year 2024, extracted 27 October 2026.[8][9] Figures for every country are in our EU manufacturing enterprises by country dataset, which you can download as a CSV (2024 data). Do not compare these counts directly with the number of rows on an approved list: one enterprise can run several approved sites, and many food enterprises need no approval. For the Irish NACE divisions behind these figures, see NACE codes for Irish manufacturing.

1. Pick the sections that match your range. A supplier of hygienic dairy valves might start with Section IX. A refrigeration supplier might add cold stores.
2. Export or copy the rows with the list date, and keep the approval number as the stable identifier.
3. Resolve the operator. Match the listed name to a legal entity and, where you can, the parent group. Treat the approval number as identifying the site.
4. Confirm the activity at the site from the operator's own published material, an industrial emissions permit if the site has one, or other public records. The list's codes say what is approved, not what equipment is installed.
5. Apply your brief. Check size, territory and exclusions against your written ideal customer profile, and hold any record where the evidence conflicts.
6. Record what is still unknown, such as equipment, decision-makers and timing, so nobody treats a listed site as a sales-ready account.

For Irish segments and worksheets, see Irish food and beverage company research. For application questions on pumps and flow control, see pump and flow-control prospecting. Once one plant is accepted, use lookalike account research to find similar plants.

This example is fictional. The supplier, the operator and the list row are invented.

A fictional supplier of hygienic heat exchangers wants dairy processing sites in Ireland and Belgium. On the Belgian list, its researcher finds a row for "Fictional Dairy Co", Section IX, at a named town, with an approval number. The researcher records the list date and approval number.

The operator's own website describes milk powder production at that town, which matches the brief. A national company register links the trading name to a legal entity owned by a larger fictional group. Group-level exclusions are therefore checked: the group is not an existing customer. Site size is not published, so the size rule stays "not verified" and the record is held instead of accepted. The researcher notes the next question: is there public evidence of headcount or capacity at the site?

Checklist before you use an approved list

• ☐ The list's country, section and refresh date are recorded
• ☐ The approval number is kept as the site identifier
• ☐ The operator is resolved to a legal entity and, where possible, a group
• ☐ The site activity is confirmed from a second source
• ☐ Missing size, equipment and contact data is marked unknown, not guessed
• ☐ Beverage and other non-animal plants are sourced from emissions permits and company records

Where is the EU list of approved food establishments?

The European Commission's approved EU food establishments page links to each member state's lists in TRACES and to national websites.[1][2][3]

In TRACES, open Publications, then Establishment Listings. You can filter by country, chapter, section, the date a list is valid on and its sequence number, then download each list as a PDF or Excel file. The same listings also cover approved establishments in non-EU countries.[13]

Where are the approved establishments lists for Ireland?

The FSAI's Approved Food Premises page links to the lists kept by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the HSE and the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority.[5]

Are breweries and soft-drinks plants on approved lists?

Usually not. Approval mainly applies to establishments handling products of animal origin. Other food businesses are registered instead.[4] The largest breweries, distilleries and soft-drinks plants can be found through industrial emissions permits, which cover plants processing vegetable raw materials above 300 tonnes of finished product a day.[10][11]

Do the lists include company size or contact details?

No list we checked gives employee numbers or contacts. Rows give an approval number, name, location, activity, category and species.[4][6]

Is the UK list the same as the EU list?

No. The Food Standards Agency publishes lists for England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland on GOV.UK.[7]

1. European Commission: Approved EU food establishments
2. European Commission: Approved EU food establishments, national websites
3. European Commission TRACES: Lists of establishments
4. European Commission: Technical specifications for the lists of approved food establishments (SANCO/2179/2005 Revision 2025r5)
5. Food Safety Authority of Ireland: Approved Food Premises
6. Food Safety Authority of Ireland: HSE Approved Establishments
7. Food Standards Agency: Approved food establishments
8. Eurostat: Enterprises by detailed NACE Rev. 2 activity and special aggregates (sbs_ovw_act)
9. Eurostat: Enterprise statistics by size class and NACE Rev. 2 activity (sbs_sc_ovw)
10. legislation.gov.uk: Directive 2010/75/EU on industrial emissions, Annex I, point 6
11. European Environment Agency: Industrial Emissions Portal
12. Environmental Protection Agency (Ireland): LEAP licensing and permitting portal
13. European Commission TRACES help: LMS listing

Lists and pages were opened on 27 October 2026. Eurostat figures were extracted on 27 October 2026 from data last updated on 30 September 2026.