Code of ethics

1 PREAMBLE

1.1 The statutory tasks of the FNMD include campaigning for the legal recognition of nutritional mushrooms as traditional foods and their use in or as dietary supplements, and to further increase the confidence of consumers and authorities in this product group.
1.2 This requires not only the formulation of uniform quality standards for the use of mushroom raw materials and mushroom extracts, but also the observance of existing legal specifications for the distribution and marketing of nutritional mushroom products made from them (e.g. as dietary supplements) by the member companies of the FNMD.
1.3 To this end, the member companies of the FNMD commit to abide by the following rules:

2 DISTRIBUTION

Nutritional mushroom products that are no longer considered safe based on the exceeding of statutory limit values and/or for other reasons are immediately removed from distribution or recalled.

3 ADVERTISING

3.1 Nutritional mushrooms and/or nutritional mushroom products containing these may not be advertised to end users with properties relating to the healing, alleviation or prevention of illness.
3.2 If nutritional mushroom products are advertised with specific health-related statements, these statements must be permitted in accordance with Regulation (EC) 1924/2006, and the nutritional mushroom product or the components contained in this must fulfil the permitted conditions.
3.3 Specific health-related promotional statements that relate in isolation to mushroom raw materials or extracts produced from these must have been examined scientifically in a corresponding human study with identical mushroom raw materials or mushroom extract by the compilation of the 3rd Parts List for Botanicals, thus scientifically confirming the claimed health-related cause-effect relationship. All other promotional statements relating to the nutritional mushroom products must be factually correct, may not disparage competing products from competitors or exploit their good reputation in an unfair manner.
3.4 Nutritional value-related promotional statements relating to nutritional mushroom products always require Community-wide marketing authorisation by virtue of Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 and must be made in harmony with the requirements specified in it. This requires that, for mushroom raw materials and extracts made from them, the consumption of the respective products supplies a sufficient quantity of the substances contained in them, the physiological effect of which is substantiated.

4 COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE MEMBERS

4.1 Cooperation between the members of the FNMD is limited to collaboration on topics relevant to the Federation. This also includes the conducting of legal test cases to further develop the law relating to nutritional mushroom products.
4.2 If contractual cooperations are entered into among the members of the FNMD for the purpose of the approval of certain mushroom raw materials or health-related statements, it should be ensured that the results of these can be used by all of the cooperation partners involved.
4.3 Furthermore, the members of the FNMD are prohibited as part of their collaboration from all agreements between each other on prices, customers and sales areas.
4.4 The members of the FNMD are always committed to fair and honest conduct towards each other. If corresponding conduct-related infringements occur, these should initially be remedied as part of an attempt at conciliation undertaken with the consultation of the Federation board between the affected and infringing member within a period of a maximum of 10 days. If the Federation board itself has committed an infringement, the managing director of the Federation along with a further member who is not involved will undertake the attempt at conciliation. In the event that the attempt at conciliation is unsuccessful, this will be handled like a warning and may then immediately continue to be enforced by judicial means by the affected member.
4.5 Repeated infringements by members of the FNMD against this code of ethics and the applicable legal regulations entitle the Federation board to exclude the infringing member from the FNMD without notice.