Just a few years ago, many importers and processors treated pesticide residue testing primarily as an administrative formality. Today, the market reality is completely different. An unprecedented tightening of requirements is currently taking place on the Polish food market, drastically changing the rules of the game for entities importing raw materials from third countries. A single batch of raw material that fails to meet EU and national criteria is enough to cause severe consequences for a company: immediate detention of goods at the border, product recalls from the market, financial penalties, or the necessity of undergoing costly disposal.
The philosophy of oversight for products imported into the European Union and the Polish market is being drastically tightened. A perfect example of this is the new national Regulation of the Minister of Health of April 30, 2026, regarding the establishment of specific requirements for foodstuffs concerning residues of active substances in plant protection products. These regulations—developed in close cooperation between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development—introduce a strict rule of no detectable residues (the so-called “zero tolerance”) for substances considered particularly dangerous that have been banned in the EU but are still used outside its borders. These dynamic changes mean that the line of business safety increasingly runs directly through the laboratory.
Legal Basis: Which Regulations Govern the Market?
Pesticide oversight relies on two complementary legislative levels—EU and national:
- Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 of the European Parliament and of the Council of February 23, 2005, on maximum residue levels of pesticides in or on food and feed of plant and animal origin and amending Council Directive 91/414/EEC (as amended). This is the overriding act that defines MRL (Maximum Residue Level) limits for hundreds of chemical substances across the entire EU.
- National Regulation of the Minister of Health of April 30, 2026. This is an interventionist regulation introduced on the basis of Article 7, Paragraph 3 of the Act on Food and Nutrition Safety. It triggers increased monitoring and strict restrictions for selected high-risk imported product groups. The new regulations are temporary and will remain in force for 12 months or until solutions are introduced at the European Union level.
The newly implemented mechanism aims primarily to protect consumer health (in particular vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women, or seniors) from substances that disrupt the hormonal system, reproductive system, or genetic material. Additionally, a key objective of the regulation is to level the playing field for Polish farmers, who strictly comply with EU restrictions, while imported food from outside the EU was previously sometimes treated more liberally.
The mentioned substances, classified as herbicides or fungicides depending on their purpose, are designed to protect crop species from weeds and fungi. However, the intensive use of plant protection products causes pesticides to remain within the structure and on the surface of crops, which, in light of the new regulations, eliminates them from the market at the slightest exceedance.
Hard Data: New MRL Limits for Fruits and Vegetables
Many importers do not realize how low the current MRL (Maximum Residue Level) limits are. The new Polish regulations impose a strict requirement of no residues for substances such as thiophanate-methyl, carbendazim, benomyl, and glufosinate^1). Values of 0.01 mg/kg (for residues of carbendazim, benomyl (expressed as carbendazim), and thiophanate-methyl) and 0.03 mg/kg (for residues of glufosinate) practically mean the analytical limit of quantification—any detectable presence of these specific pesticides completely disqualifies the goods.
^1) Glufosinate (the sum of glufosinate isomers, its salts, and its metabolites – 3-[hydroxy(methyl)phosphinoyl]propionic acid (MPP) and N-acetyl-glufosinate (NAG) – is expressed as glufosinate).
Business Consequences for Clients
The lack of regular analyses is, above all, a huge operational risk that can lead a company into a sudden financial crisis in this era of tightened controls. Here is how negligence in planning laboratory verification translates into real business losses:
- Cause: Failure to verify a supplier from a third country and lack of pesticide residue analysis (including specific methods) prior to shipping the goods to Poland.
➔ Consequence: Official sampling at the border by Sanepid (State Sanitary Inspection) reveals the presence of thiophanate-methyl at a level of 0.04 mg/kg (against a maximum criterion of 0.01 mg/kg). The goods are immediately blocked at the border, and the importer incurs container demurrage costs, loss of margin, and forced, extremely expensive disposal of the batch.
- Cause: Relying solely on a foreign Certificate of Analysis (CoA) provided by a manufacturer from Asia or South America.
➔ Consequence: A retail chain (e.g., a large discount store) conducts its own independent laboratory testing on the store shelf. The detection of exceedances results in the immediate termination of the contract, the imposition of contractual penalties amounting to hundreds of thousands of PLN, and the importer being blacklisted as a supplier.
- Cause: Using raw materials without a confirmed status of analytical purity for the production of processed food (e.g., baby purees, jams).
➔ Consequence: The RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) system publishes a public warning. The company is forced to recall the product from the market. This results in an irreversible loss of consumer trust and a drastic drop in the brand’s stock or image value.
Advanced Analytics: How to Detect Trace Amounts of Substances?
Determining such low concentrations (at the level of 0.01 mg/kg, which constitutes an absolute limit of acceptability under the new regulations) requires laboratories to implement state-of-the-art technologies and testing methods with very low detection limits. The standard in modern analytics is the use of hyphenated instrumental techniques:
- Gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS, GC-MS/MS)
- Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS)
In the sample preparation process, the validated QuEChERS procedure (in accordance with the PN-EN 15662 standard) is widely used, allowing for the extraction of pesticide residues in food while maintaining the highest repeatability of results. There are also single-residue methods dedicated to substances that—due to their chemical properties or residue definition—cannot be determined by multi-residue methods and require different sample preparation, such as glufosinate.
The Role of an Accredited Laboratory in Pesticide Testing
In order for pesticide residue analyses to hold full legal value and be recognized by competent official control authorities and retail chains, they must be performed by an accredited laboratory.
At J.S. Hamilton Poland, we perform comprehensive testing of pesticide residues in food. The methods are accredited by the Polish Centre for Accreditation (PCA) based on the PN-EN ISO/IEC 17025 standard. Our laboratory and experts provide a wide range of tests: screening covering several hundred active substances in a single analysis, as well as over a dozen single-residue methods.