On 10 August we wrote that we could not confirm whether the draft delegated act amending Annex I of the EU Deforestation Regulation had been adopted. It had. The Commission adopted Delegated Regulation C(2026) 4920 on 13 July 2026, and the Council Secretariat circulated it, with its annex and explanatory memorandum, on 14 July. We missed a document that had been public for four weeks. This piece corrects that, and reads what the adopted text actually does to a food operator’s product list.
The act is not yet in force. Under Article 35(6) of the regulation, a delegated act “shall enter into force only if no objection has been expressed either by the European Parliament or by the Council within a period of two months of notification”, extendable by a further two months at either institution’s initiative. The Council’s cover note records receipt on 13 July. Absent an extension, the objection window closes on 13 September 2026 — four days from publication of this article — after which the act is published in the Official Journal and enters into force the following day.
The headline changes were in the draft and survived: instant coffee, frozen cattle tongues and a longer list of palm derivatives come in; hides, skins and leather go out. What the draft did not contain, and the adopted act does, is a deferred application date of 30 December 2027 for every product being added, a written record of which requested changes were refused, and a set of species and “ex” qualifiers that narrow the list at the edges. Those are the parts an operator needs.
What was assessed, what changed, what was refused
The explanatory memorandum is unusually candid about method. After the public feedback period, it says, “25 product codes resulting from stakeholders’ suggestions during the public feedback were evaluated for possible inclusion or exclusion”, assessed “through the methodology presented in the Staff Working Document”, and “six targeted changes are included in the final text”.
| Request | Code | Outcome | Memorandum’s reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exclude prepared or preserved beef | ex 1602 50 | Refused — stays in scope | “did pass the cost-benefit analysis and thus remained in scope” |
| Exclude cocoa shells, husks and waste | 1802 | Refused — stays in scope, with a clarification that waste under Directive 2008/98/EC is excluded | as above |
| Exclude vulcanised rubber articles, conveyor and transmission belts | 4010, 4016 | Removed | “limited natural rubber content, and thus limited contribution to deforestation” |
| Narrow seats to wooden seats | 9401 | Replaced by a specific list | aircraft and vehicle seats “contain very limited amounts of wood” |
| Exclude soya beans for sowing | soya seeds for sowing (code not restated in memorandum) | Removed | “negligible trade volumes” and a separate certified value chain |
| Add oleic, linoleic and linolenic acids and esters made from palm | ex 2916 15 | Added, from 30 December 2027 | “to ensure consistency across the oleochemicals supply chain” |
| Include rubber balloons; soap in other forms; surfactants and detergents; wood-plastic composites | 9503 00 99; 3401 19 00; 3402 39–49; ch. 39 | Refused | “did not pass the cost-benefit analysis” |
| Include further soy derivatives | codes not restated in memorandum | Refused | “did not pass the cost-benefit analysis” |
| Include biofuels; soluble coffee; animal feed preparations; remove palm kernel oilcake | 3826 00; 2101 11 00; 2309; 2306 60 | “already assessed in the Staff Working Document” — coffee added, feed not, oilcake kept | see below |
| Exclude wood residues and sawmill by-products | 4401 | Refused | already regulated under the Timber Regulation; request “lacking the support of relevant industry sectors” |
Two of those rows matter for a food company more than any of the coffee coverage.
Prepared beef stays. Someone asked for “ex 1602 50 Other prepared or preserved meat, meat offal, blood, of cattle” to leave the list. The memorandum says the code passed the cost-benefit test and stays. Any operator placing canned, cooked or ready-meal beef products on the EU market from 30 December 2026 is in scope, and the cattle in them need geolocated origin. The request itself is evidence that at least one part of the industry had assumed otherwise.
Animal feed did not come in. The memorandum lists “preparations used in animal feeding (HS code 2309)” among products whose inclusion was “already assessed” in the staff working document, and the annex does not add it. Compound feed containing soy or palm kernel expeller remains outside Annex I as a finished product, even though the expeller itself (2306 60) stays in. We noted in our UK-divergence piece that palm kernel expeller is in scope and soya hulls are not; the adopted act does not change either, and adds only an “ex” to the oilcake line.
Practical consequence: if your compliance mapping was built on the draft, the product list is the same but the reasoning is now on the record. Anyone planning to argue a marginal product out of scope should read which arguments the Commission has already rejected, and on what basis, before making them to a competent authority.
The additions, with their dates
Every added entry in the annex carries the line “This provision shall apply from 30 December 2027”. The memorandum explains it as giving “economic operators, competent authorities, and custom authorities” time “to adapt to the new categories of products”. The deletions carry no such line; they take effect with the act.
| New or amended entry | Code | Applies from |
|---|---|---|
| Frozen cattle tongues | ex 0206 21 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Extracts, essences and concentrates of coffee (soluble coffee) | 2101 11 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Palm, palm kernel and babassu oils, hydrogenated, inter-esterified, re-esterified or elaidinised | ex 1516 20 | 30 December 2027 |
| Chemically modified palm oils; “inedible mixtures or preparations of animal, vegetable or microbial fats or oils” that contain or were made using oil palm | ex 1518 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Crude glycerol, glycerol waters and lyes produced using oil palm | ex 1520 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Fatty alcohols synthesised using oil palm (octanol, lauryl, cetyl, stearyl and other saturated monohydric alcohols) | ex 2905 16, 2905 17 00, 2905 19 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Esters of acetic acid synthesised using oil palm | ex 2915 39 | 30 December 2027 |
| Oleic, linoleic, linolenic acids, salts and esters synthesised using oil palm; undecenoic acids | ex 2916 15, 2916 19 10 | 30 December 2027 |
| Palm-derived amines, quaternary ammonium salts, amides | ex 2921 19, 2923 90 00, 2924 19 00 | 30 December 2027 |
| Soap containing or made using oil palm | ex 3401 11 00, 3401 20 | 30 December 2027 |
| Other chemical preparations and polyethers made using oil palm | ex 3824 99, 3907 29 | 30 December 2027 |
Two entries in that table reach into the fermentation supply chain directly.
The first is crude glycerol (ex 1520 00) “that have been produced using oil palm”. Crude glycerol is a biodiesel by-product and a candidate fermentation carbon source. From the end of 2027, palm-origin glycerol placed on the EU market carries a due-diligence obligation; soy-origin or tallow-origin glycerol does not. A fermentation operator buying glycerol as feedstock will need the origin declared to know which side of the line a lot sits on, which is precisely the provenance information the glycerol market does not routinely provide.
The second is the wording of ex 1518 00, which names “microbial fats or oils” in mixtures “that contain or have been made using oil palm”. The phrase tracks the wording of the customs heading, and the obligation attaches to the palm content, not the microbial fat. But a blended fat that includes a fermentation-derived lipid and a palm fraction is now listed in Annex I by description, which it was not before.
Practical consequence: the 2027 deferral creates a twelve-month window between the general application date and the additions. Instant-coffee packers and oleochemical buyers have that window; nobody else does. Do not read the deferral as applying to anything already in the list.
The qualifiers that narrow the list
Three table notes added to the “relevant commodity” column restrict what counts.
“Cattle” now “only applies to cattle of the genus Bos and its sub-generas” and “does not apply to buffalo (Syncerus genus) or bison (Bison genus)”. “Oil palm” applies to Elaeis spp. and “does not apply to babassu oil from genus Attalea spp.” “Rubber” applies to Hevea brasiliensis only.
A separate note removes “Samples of products, which are of negligible value and quantity” used to solicit orders, and products “to undergo examination, analysis or tests” that are consumed or destroyed in the process. Pilot-plant trial quantities and laboratory samples of an in-scope ingredient fall outside the regulation on that wording.
Across the palm and rubber sections, entries gain an “ex” prefix and, in the memorandum’s words, the clarification “that products included in that Annex fall within the scope of Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 only in so far as they are produced using a relevant commodity”. A stearic acid line that previously read “2915 70 Palmitic acid, stearic acid, their salts and esters” now reads “ex 2915 70 Palmitic acid, stearic acid, their salts and esters that have been synthesized using oil palm”. The same oleochemical made from tallow or coconut is out.
A further exemption removes products “to the extent they are used in the manufacturing of medicinal products for human or veterinary use”. Food and feed uses have no equivalent carve-out.
Practical consequence: the “ex” qualifier moves the burden. An operator buying an oleochemical no longer needs to ask only “is this code listed” but “was this lot synthesised from oil palm”. The supplier’s declaration of feedstock origin becomes the compliance document, and most oleochemical specifications do not currently state it.
The application dates, resolved
In August we could not settle, from secondary sources, which operators the 30 December 2026 date applied to. The consolidated regulation text as of 26 December 2025 settles it. Article 38(2) applies the substantive obligations from 30 December 2026. Article 38(3) defers them to 30 June 2027 for operators who are “natural persons or micro- or small undertakings” under the Accounting Directive “who were established as such by 31 December 2024”, except for products already covered by the Timber Regulation. Medium-sized operators are on the December date. The “large and medium” formulation in some commentary is a paraphrase of that, and the “all operators” formulation in the Council’s release is not wrong either; the difference is the micro and small carve-out.
Counter-argument
The strongest case against treating this act as significant is that it is, on its own terms, “limited and targeted technical fixes” — the memorandum’s phrase — and that the general scope review is not due until 2030 under Article 34(2). Six changes out of 25 requests is a conservative outcome. The additions are deferred a year. Nothing in it moves the December 2026 date or touches the legality requirement, which we identified in August as the largest compliance cost.
That is a fair reading of the act’s scale. It is not a reason to skip the memorandum, which is the only public record of the Commission’s reasoning on twenty-five specific product arguments, and it is the document a competent authority will cite when an operator raises one of them again.
What we could not establish
- Whether Parliament or the Council has moved to object or to extend the scrutiny period. We found no objection motion in the sources we could reach. Linklaters’ note gives 13 September as the end of the two-month period “unless it is extended”. We derive the same date from the 13 July receipt recorded on the Council cover note and Article 35(6), but we cannot confirm from an institutional source that no extension has been requested.
- The Official Journal publication date. None yet, on our reading of EUR-Lex.
- Who requested the exclusion of prepared beef and cocoa waste. The memorandum records the requests and their refusal without attribution.
- The staff working document SWD(2026) 194. We read the memorandum’s account of its methodology, not the document itself.
- Why the additions carry a 30 December 2027 date and not 30 June 2027, to align with the micro and small operator deferral. The memorandum gives the general rationale for deferral but not the choice of date.
What to watch
- 13 September 2026. If the act is not published in the Official Journal in the weeks after, either an institution objected or the period was extended. The Council register will show which.
- The Official Journal number. Once published, the delegated regulation gets a number and the consolidated Annex I on EUR-Lex is updated; that consolidated table, not the draft or the Council PDF, becomes the reference for product mapping.
- Glycerol origin declarations. If fermentation feedstock suppliers begin stating palm versus non-palm origin on specifications before December 2027, the “ex” qualifier is doing its work. If they do not, expect a wave of due-diligence statements filed on the assumption that the answer is “not palm”.
- The 2030 review. Leather’s return, and feed’s inclusion, are both explicitly parked there.