Santa at the Top of FDA's Naughty List

In the following article, FDAImports takes a tongue-in-cheek look at how the activities of Santa Clause would be assessed by FDA.

Santa Claus should be at the top of the U.S. Food And Drug Administration’s “naughty list” according to Benjamin England, a 17-year veteran of the FDA and Founder of FDAImports.com.  According to England Santa Claus has broken almost every rule in the book and violated numerous food, drug, facility registration and import laws, regulations and standards over the years as he has illegally imported millions of dollars worth of merchandise to children in the United States, albeit as gifts.  Since all imports coming into the United States must comply with United States Customs regulations, Santa’s activities every December 24th are cause for both alert and action, especially as the number of gift-hungry American children grows each year.  

1. Undeclared food, drug and cosmetic imports.  Many children request edible gifts for Christmas such as chocolate or candy- others request cosmetic products including make-up kits or lip-gloss. By bringing these products into the United States and failing to have them undergo proper FDA screening and inspection, Santa is in fact out of compliance, no matter how big or small the quantity. “They call that smuggling, folks,” England said.
2. Facility registration and inspection.  It’s a known fact that at the North Pole Santa employs thousands of workers and operates a series of factories and warehouses- many of which produce food products, beverages, medical devices (such as kids sunglasses), and pet chews, or involve hazardous chemicals in production (such as with plastics). According to England these facilities must be properly registered with the FDA as well as have a U.S. agent with whom FDA can correspond regarding the safety of the products and inspection of these facilities.  After a rigorous search of FDA’s data systems, it is apparent that at the current time none of Santa’s overseas manufacturing plants are registered with the FDA.
3. Labels and packaging.  With 2.2 billion children in the world receiving at least one gift per Christmas, one can imagine how many packages and labels accompany the gifts and what kinds of claims, ingredients and instructions must be present. Gifts received by 59 million American children (62,889,723 children – 5% naughty = 59,745,237) must all have compliant labels and packaging, England said, especially the claims and statements on products like candy, cosmetics or medical devices which minors might be receiving this Christmas. No one can be certain if all of the products that Santa delivers have labels and packaging that are compliant with current U.S. FDA regulations and the Food Safety Modernization Act.