Importing food into Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority requires food products to be registered before they are imported. Registration happens on SFDA’s GHAD platform, which replaced the older FRCS system and now handles product registration, facility registration and licensing in one place. SFDA completed the move by launching the third and final phase of food services on GHAD on 25 May 2025.

Two things get registered, and people routinely do only the first. The product itself is registered under the Saudi importer’s account. The manufacturing facility abroad, and any warehouse, also has to be known to SFDA. A product registration attached to an unregistered facility is the ordinary reason a first consignment from a new supplier does not move.

A product that is not on GHAD under the importer’s account cannot enter the market, however good the documentation travelling with it.

A food consignment travels with commercial documentation — invoice, packing list, certificate of origin — and with the regulatory documents for the product: typically a health certificate, a halal certificate where the product requires one, and a Certificate of Conformity.

The Certificate of Conformity is the document that most often carries laboratory results. It is issued against the product’s specification and the applicable Gulf and Saudi requirements, and where it references a test result, that result has to come from a laboratory and a method that will stand up if the consignment is examined.

Clearance is submitted through FASEH, SFDA’s electronic clearance system, which handles clearance requests for food, drug products, medical devices, cosmetics and imported fodder, and through which certification bodies issue consignment conformity certificates. During 2025 SFDA moved food Certificates of Conformity onto FASEH exclusively, so a workflow that used to run elsewhere no longer does.

FASEH is not the same system as FASAH, which is the national customs and logistics platform. Both appear in the same conversation and the names differ by one letter. FASEH is where SFDA clearance happens; FASAH is where the customs side runs.

SFDA inspects imported food at the point of entry and may sample a consignment for laboratory examination. What is sampled depends on the commodity and its risk profile: contaminant and residue testing on high-risk commodities, microbiological examination on products where that is the hazard, and compositional or labelling checks against what the pack declares.

This is the point at which everything upstream is tested for real. A consignment held for a result is expensive in a way that pre-shipment testing is not, which is why importers with a mature process test before the goods move rather than after they arrive.

Testing appears twice. Before shipment, to establish that the product genuinely meets the specification and the Gulf limits that apply to it, and to support the Certificate of Conformity. And after arrival, if a consignment is sampled and you need your own result to set against the regulator’s.

For the second case, keep a retained sample from every consignment under the storage conditions the product requires. A dispute about a result is very hard to argue without a sample of the same lot, held properly.