At present, the health food industry in China is under rapid development, but the relevant system is still imperfect and there are some problems in product positioning, impeding the development of the health food industry in China. The concept of “dual-track” management of health foods was first proposed in 2015 and officially implemented in the following year. The introduction of the new policies not only complies with the trend of rapid development of the health food industry, but also can promote the expansion of production in the industry. Meanwhile, the newly added approval and filing procedures place stricter requirements for making claims about the efficacy of health foods in order to strengthen the major responsibility of enterprises. On December 1, 2020, five health food raw materials such as coenzyme Q₁₀, broken Ganoderma lucidum spore powder, fish oil, melatonin, and spirulina were included into the health food raw material directory, which started on March 1, 2021. This is of profound significance for putting other health food raw materials under directory management, which can solve the problem of “emphasizing pre-approval and neglecting post-market supervision” and promote the continuous standardized development of the industry. This paper focuses on the approval and analysis of the five health food raw materials before they were included into the directory, aiming to provide suggestions for promoting the compilation and revision of the directory of health food raw materials.

With the rapid development of the economy and society and the increasing improvement of people’s living standards, people have gained a scientific understanding of the sub-health state of the body. Many foods with functional claims such as supplementing dietary nutrients, maintaining or improving the body’s health status and reducing the risk of disease have emerged on the market. At the same time, as the country has introduced new policies, laws and regulations such as the “Healthy China 2030” plan to support the development of the health industry, the objective need for food functional claims has become increasingly apparent. But our current laws and regulations do not clearly definite the concept of functional foods and its requirements, so the directions of research, production and sale, market recognition and market regulation of functional foods are unclear. In particular, functional foods cannot be discriminated from health foods, which have a legal definition. In the long term, this will not only fail to promote scientific and technological innovations in ordinary foods, but also hinder the healthy development of the health food industry. In this paper, information concerning the definition and requirements of functional foods is collected and sorted out from government official documents, websites, academic journals, and other authoritative media, and the current focuses of research on functional foods in China and abroad are compared by visual analysis of high-frequency keywords. Moreover, this paper differentiates between the requirements for functional foods and those for health foods, and it suggests that top-level design be made for refined classification of functional foods on the market and puts forward suggestions on how to better connect each category with the current system.