Warehousing our range in the EU - what it would take

1. The catch: most of our range is novel-food ingredients, and the warehouse is the exposed way to handle them

Anything we hold in an EU warehouse and ship to EU customers is "placed on the market" as a formal, in-country operation. Our range splits into two groups on that test:

• Novel-food supplements - NMN, NAD+, spermidine, fisetin and similar: these are unauthorised novel foods. They are still sold in the EU, but only as a grey market - and one that member-state authorities squeezed hard from ~2023, when enforcement caught up and mainstream EU retail pulled NMN stock.NutrolaNutraIngredients The routes that survive are shipping from outside the EU (what we do now) or a "not for human consumption" dodge - not clean, in-country, registered operations. EFSA gave a positive opinion on beta-NMN on 11 May 2026, so authorisation is possible around Q4 2026, though tied to a specific applicant's process.NMN DE/EU
• Everything else - cosmetics + non-novel supplements: no novel-food question. These can be warehoused and sold in the EU cleanly once the compliance setup (below) is done.

2. The legal basis - why holding stock in the EU is the prohibited act

The rule is not "you can't import NMN" - it is more specific, and that specificity is exactly why a warehouse differs from a parcel. Two pieces of law interlock:

• The prohibition - Regulation (EU) 2015/2283, Article 6(2): "Only novel foods authorised and included in the Union list may be placed on the market in the Union ..."Art 6 NMN is not on the Union list.
• What "placed on the market" means - Regulation (EC) 178/2002, Article 3(8): "the holding of food ... for the purpose of sale, including offering for sale or any other form of transfer ... and the sale, distribution, and other forms of transfer themselves."Art 3(8)

Read together: holding NMN stock in an EU warehouse for the purpose of sale is itself "placing on the market" - the prohibited act - before a single unit is sold. The banned thing is holding-for-sale, and a warehouse full of it is exactly that.

So why is a single parcel different? The molecule is identical; what differs is where the holding-for-sale happens and who can be enforced against:

That is the real distinction: a warehouse moves the prohibited act (holding for sale) from outside the EU to inside it, and hands the authority seizable stock plus an enforceable local operator. A cross-border parcel gives them nothing to grab.

Honest caveat: even the cross-border sale is not squeaky-clean - it could be argued to target the EU market - it is just practically unenforceable, which is why we and many others do it. There is no written "personal-use exemption" in the novel-food rules; it is an enforceability gap, not a carve-out.

3. What an EU warehouse changes versus what we do now

We already ship EU orders DDP, so we already act as the importer and clear EU customs on every parcel today.DDP=seller imports An EU warehouse changes three things:

• Cost: import once in bulk at cost value (lower duty base) and do cheap local last-mile, instead of paying duty on retail value on every parcel. This gets more attractive now that the EUR 150 duty de-minimis is removed from 1 July 2026.de-minimis
• Speed: 48h EU delivery from local stock vs multi-day from Hong Kong.
• Scrutiny: holding stock and selling at scale from within the EU is formal placing-on-market, so full product compliance becomes non-negotiable (it is the price of the cost/speed gains).

Location note: the warehouse does not need to be in Germany. From any EU warehouse (Floship's is LithuaniaFloship EU) goods move freely across the single market. Germany-specific rules (German-language label, food-supplement notification) attach to selling to German customers, not to where the stock sits.

4. EU Responsible Person - what it is, and can we be our own?

To place cosmetics or general consumer goods on the EU market you must have an EU-established Responsible Person / economic operator who holds the product file, ensures the labelling and compliance, and is the authorities' contact.GPSR RPCosmetics RP

Yes, we can be our own RP. We can either establish our own EU entity (a subsidiary or importer company) and designate it as the Responsible Person, or appoint a third-party RP service - both are legally valid.RP can be own subsidiary

• Own EU entity: more control, and we would likely need an EU entity anyway to be importer of record and register for VAT. More setup and ongoing admin.
• Third-party RP service: faster, lower commitment, good for a pilot; an ongoing fee per product/brand.

Open item: we do not currently know whether we already have an EU RP appointed (from the 2024 Complizon/Obelis work) or none. That is the first thing to confirm - it tells us how exposed we already are today, before any warehouse.

5. The split-fulfillment problem (the real operational question)

Because only the compliant subset can be warehoused in the EU, every EU order falls into one of three buckets:

Your proposed rule - only route an order to the EU warehouse when the whole order can be fulfilled from EU stock, otherwise fulfil cross-border as now - is operationally clean and avoids split parcels. The catch is customer-facing: at checkout it is hard to present, and if NMN (our hero product) is in most EU orders, very few orders would qualify for the EU warehouse, which undercuts the economics.

We ran the numbers (RBS Order Analytics, EU shipping destinations, last 12 months): 2,014 EU orders, ~USD 642k, steady at ~168 orders/month. The share that could ship entirely from an EU warehouse (orders with no novel-food item):

So 80-90% of EU orders (and 82-91% of revenue) contain a novel-food ingredient - the products that can only go through the grey route, not a clean in-country warehouse. The cleanly-warehouseable subset is only ~22-35 orders a month, and many of those would still be mixed baskets (warehouseable + novel items together), which pushes the true figure lower.

6. Do we have the volume? no - not yet

An EU warehouse carries fixed costs (storage minimums, import handling, and the RP / EU-entity / VAT overhead). At ~22-35 warehouseable-only orders a month (~USD 60-115k a year, and shrinking once mixed baskets are excluded), the compliant subset is well below the scale that justifies that setup. We would be building an EU compliance-and-logistics stack to serve under a fifth of our EU orders.

The economics only work when the novel actives are authorised and the other ~80-90% of orders come into scope. That is the event to plan around - not a fulfilment decision we make now.

7. Fulfillment provider - use Floship recommended

The provider is the easy, secondary decision, and we already have the answer:

8. Product-by-product compliance

9. What it would take - and the recommendation

Recommendation: do not stand up an EU warehouse now. The order-mix data (section 5) shows the compliant subset is too small to justify it. Keep shipping cross-border from Floship's HK warehouse as we do today, and use the wait productively:

• Confirm our current EU Responsible Person status (do we have one from the 2024 work, or none?) - first question for Lisa Maras / Complizon, and worth resolving regardless of the warehouse, since GPSR/Cosmetics rules apply to our EU sales today.
• Track NMN novel-food authorisation (watch Q4 2026) and confirm whether our supplier's process would be covered - this is the trigger that changes the answer.
• Pre-stage the compliance groundwork so we can move fast when it clears: decide RP model (own EU entity - which also covers importer + VAT - vs a third-party service), and scope the EU/German relabelling + cosmetic CPNP notification.
• When the actives are authorised, stand up the warehouse through Floship EU (existing integration) for the now-in-scope range.
• Optional near-term test: if we want an EU beachhead sooner, the only compliant candidates today are cosmetics + non-novel supplements (~USD 60-115k/yr) - viable as a small pilot, but not a business case on its own.