Curious what the barriers you face exporting to the UK currently?
Given the transition period the UK has been going through with the country still effectively in the EU without being a member state, I’d have thought it would be the same exporting to the UK as any other EU state, at least until the end of the year.
Surely you’d have to wait until 2021 to feel any pain unless I’m missing something?
EDIT: Also, I’m fascinated. Are you allowed to market your product as “cheese” under EU regulations? From what I understand they’re quite strict on what constitutes basic foodstuffs like cheese. The dairy industry has lobbied hard against this sort of thing.
Until Dec 31 we can ship to the UK as if it were part of the EU, that's correct. But we opened for business in November and we knew the deadline was coming, so the UK was out of the game for us from the get go. We'll need to see how shipping to the UK will work after that, but for now we've got other things to worry about :)
Unfortunately, the product can't be called "cheese" (or "plant-based cheese" for that matter). Currently, "cheese alternative" seems to be fine as there's one precedent (in Germany at least) where a plant-based cheese company won the case. My understanding is that it's ok to talk about "cheese" on your website, but when the customer makes the buying decision it needs to be made clear that this is a cheese alternative.
Honestly, there are no clear guidelines here and the law is very fuzzy. It's a big pain in the ass, especially for a small company like ours with little resources to spend for unnecessary, zero value-adding legal actitivies like these.
Given the transition period the UK has been going through with the country still effectively in the EU without being a member state, I’d have thought it would be the same exporting to the UK as any other EU state, at least until the end of the year.
Surely you’d have to wait until 2021 to feel any pain unless I’m missing something?
EDIT: Also, I’m fascinated. Are you allowed to market your product as “cheese” under EU regulations? From what I understand they’re quite strict on what constitutes basic foodstuffs like cheese. The dairy industry has lobbied hard against this sort of thing.