B2B
The questions overseas buyers ask first, answered from the Korean regulatory record rather than from sales material.
No. An approval issued by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety is valid in South Korea. It is not a health claim in your jurisdiction and has not been evaluated by the FDA, EFSA or any other authority. Requirements differ by market — confirm ingredient status and label wording with your own authority before importing.
A notified ingredient (고시형) is listed in the MFDS public standards. There is no approval holder: any manufacturer meeting the published specification may use it. An individually approved ingredient (개별인정형) belongs to the company that obtained the approval, and only that company and its authorised supply chain may use the approved wording. Of the ingredients on this site, 96 are notified.
Ask which route. If it is notified, ask for the certificate of analysis against the compendium specification. If it is individually approved, ask for either the approval in the supplier's own name or the authorisation from the approval holder — an approval existing in Korea does not mean this supplier may use it.
The approved wording is a Korean regulatory string. It may be reproduced but not paraphrased, strengthened or extended, and it carries no standing outside Korea. English renderings on this site are marked as working translations with no regulatory standing, precisely so they are not mistaken for approved claims.
No. The daily reference value is the labelling figure used to express an amount as a percentage on a label. It is neither a recommended intake nor an upper limit, and it is set separately in each market. The approved functional intake is a different number and appears separately on each ingredient page.
MFDS designates GMP to the manufacturing site, not to the brand that sells the product. This site publishes the 480 active designated facilities with location, designation number and business type. Check the site that actually manufactures your product, which is not always the company you are negotiating with.
Individually approved ingredients have no official English name. MFDS approves them under a Korean name, and inventing an English one would produce a term matching no regulatory record — authoritative-looking and unverifiable. Notified ingredients do have established English names and those are used.
It is built from the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety's public data. The datasets are published under CC BY 4.0 at /en/data/ — credit Healthcito and you may redistribute and build on them, commercially included.
Each ingredient page and dataset carries the date its source was last synchronised, most recently 2026-07-22. Approvals change; check the date before relying on a figure.
No, and it says so on every page. Healthcito has a commercial relationship with GNM Life. Regulatory reporting and product information are kept separate, and the regulatory pages quote MFDS records rather than describing any product's benefits.
Regulatory glossary · Approved ingredients · Guides by destination market · Datasets