Indonesian Food Permits: Which Agency Issues Yours

Indonesia does not have one food permit. It has a permit for each kind of food, issued by a different part of government, and in January 2026 the legal basis for all of them was rewritten at once. Work out which category you are in before anything else, because it decides who you are dealing with for the next several months.

Four categories, four doors

The Food Act, Undang-Undang Nomor 18 Tahun 2012 tentang Pangan, is the parent statute. Its food safety provisions are carried by Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 86 Tahun 2019 tentang Keamanan Pangan, and that regulation sorted imported food into categories with a different permit and a different issuing body for each.

Processed food, Pangan Olahan, produced domestically or imported for trade in retail packaging, required an izin edar issued by the Head of BPOM before it could circulate, granted on an assessment of food safety, food quality and nutrition.

Fresh food of animal origin required a registration number, and fresh food of plant origin a listing number, both issued by the agriculture ministry, a governor or a regent according to their authority.

Fresh food of fish origin required three certificates from the marine and fisheries ministry: processing eligibility, an integrated quality management programme, and a health certificate for the processed fishery product.

For a Canadian exporter that split is the whole planning question. Milk powder, whey and maple products sit in the first group and go to BPOM. Wheat, peas, lentils and dry beans sit in the third and go to agriculture. Beef sits in the second. Groundfish sits in the fourth and goes to a ministry that has nothing to do with either of the others.

A programme that assumes BPOM handles everything has the wrong authority, the wrong dossier and the wrong calendar for most of what Canada actually sells here.

What changed on 5 January 2026

Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 1 Tahun 2026 amended the 2019 food safety regulation and took effect on the day it was promulgated, 5 January 2026. It is not a tidying-up exercise.

Article 34 now reads that processed food produced domestically or imported for trade in retail packaging must hold perizinan berusaha, business licensing, before it circulates, and that the requirements for that licensing follow the legislation on licensing and are not set out in the food safety regulation itself.

Article 38 was rewritten the same way, in three subsections that put fresh food of animal, plant and fish origin under the same business licensing obligation. Article 82 states that the licensing under the regulation is delivered through risk-based business licensing services.

Three articles were deleted outright. Article 35, on home-industry production permits. Article 39, the fisheries certificates. And Article 36, which had exempted processed food with a shelf life under seven days, food used further as an ingredient and not sold directly to the final consumer, and limited quantities brought in for a registration application, for research, or for personal consumption.

Read that carefully before concluding anything about your own consignment. The exemptions are gone from this regulation; whether equivalent relief exists in the risk-based licensing rules is a question about a different instrument, and we have not read it.

What we could not read, and why

The operative detail, meaning the dossier, the evaluation track, the fees and the timelines, is set by BPOM's own Peraturan Badan, not by the government regulations above. BPOM's legal documentation site, jdih.pom.go.id, does not answer requests from our network: the connection is established and then times out with nothing returned.

The agency's main site is reachable and is a news site. So this page gives you the statutory frame and the January 2026 change, and does not give you the filing checklist, because we have not read one off a primary source.

Ask your importer or an Indonesian regulatory consultant for the current Peraturan BPOM covering your category, and ask specifically how the January 2026 shift to perizinan berusaha is being applied to imported products in practice, because a regulation that defers to another regime is exactly where published guidance and counter practice diverge.

The order to do this in

Classify the product first, against the four categories above, and confirm the classification with the authority that would issue rather than with the importer who would like it to be simple. Then appoint the importer, because the permit and the label both attach to a party in Indonesia.

Then run the halal registration in parallel, not after, since it has its own calendar and its own deadline. The label comes last, for reasons set out on the labelling page: it carries information you do not have until the other two steps are done.