Sulphite limits in dried fruit have been stable long enough that most specifications treat them as furniture. That is about to stop being safe. In September 2026 the European Commission circulated a draft legal proposal on the authorised uses and use levels for sulphur dioxide and sulphites (E 220-228), and the numbers in it are not small adjustments. Several categories would lose half their headroom; some would lose most of it.
What the draft actually says
The proposal follows EFSA's updated dietary exposure assessment for sulphur dioxide and sulphites, published in November 2025. On the circulated draft, dried apricots would fall from 2,000 to 1,000 mg/kg and dried white grapes from 2,000 to 800 mg/kg. Dried peaches would drop from 2,000 to 300 mg/kg, dried bananas from 1,000 to 300, and dried apples and pears from 600 to 300. Dried mango and pineapple would sit at 300 mg/kg and dried coconut at 50. The residual category covering other dried fruit would fall from 500 to 150 mg/kg. The existing entry for dried figs would be deleted without replacement.
Two of those deserve a second look. Peaches losing the large majority of their permitted level is not a tightening, it is a different processing question. And the residual category matters more than its dull name suggests, because it is where anything not separately listed ends up.
What is not yet known
No implementation date or transition period has been published. The stakeholder consultation stage ran into late September 2026, and a draft of this kind normally moves through member-state discussion and a scrutiny period before it applies, generally with a transition window for existing stock. That is the honest position, and it is worth stating plainly: anyone quoting a compliance deadline today is inventing it. What can be planned for is the direction, which is clear, and the scale, which is now on paper.
The specification sentence that moves without telling you
Here is the part worth checking this week. Many supply specifications do not state an SO2 figure at all. They say the product shall comply with applicable legislation, or words to that effect. That wording is convenient until the legislation changes, at which point the specification silently changes with it — while the retail customer, whose own brief may cite a fixed number, does not move in step.
The opposite failure is a specification that hard-codes 2,000 mg/kg for apricots. That one does not move at all, and becomes non-compliant on the day a new level applies. Neither drafting style is wrong in principle; both need a decision rather than an assumption. The useful exercise is to find out what the product you actually buy contains today. A great many lots run well below the legal ceiling, and where that is true the proposed reduction changes nothing about the product and only changes the paperwork around it.
Where the pressure lands in practice
Reducing permitted sulphite affects appearance and colour stability first, not safety. Light-coloured fruit is where sulphur does its visible work, which is why apricots, white grapes, peaches and apples carry the highest current levels and face the sharpest proposed cuts. A lower ceiling means darker fruit over the same storage period, or a shorter window in which the fruit still looks the way a shelf expects. Buyers whose product is positioned on bright colour should be having that conversation now, because it takes a season rather than a week.
The second pressure is on labelling and artwork. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites are declarable above 10 mg/kg. A reformulation that takes a product below a declaration threshold, or a supplier switch that changes the treatment, reaches the ingredient panel — and print lead time is the item most often forgotten when a regulatory change is planned backwards from a deadline.
The position of a product that never used it
There is a category of dried fruit for which this entire file is administrative background: product made without sulphur treatment at all. A maximum level governs how much of an additive may be present. Where the additive is not used, no level binds, and no reduction changes anything.
That is where our own dried fruit line sits. TeraVella's fruit crisps are dried at low temperature at our geothermal facility in Sındırgı and packed as fruit and nothing else — no added sugar, no preservatives, no colourants, no sulphite. The range covers apple, banana, fig, peach, strawberry, orange, mandarin, watermelon, dragon fruit, aronia and tomato, with roughly twelve months of shelf life in retail packs. Production runs under ISO 9001 and ISO 22000, with batch-level traceability and a certificate of analysis on request; we hold no certification beyond those and say so rather than letting it blur. Volumes, pack formats and prices are confirmed at quotation, because on a private-label project the honest answer depends on format, volume and destination.
None of that makes an unsulphured product the right answer for every channel. Sulphured fruit remains the standard in mainstream retail for sound commercial reasons, and this proposal does not change that. But if a range is already positioned on a short ingredient list, the coming change is one to watch rather than one to absorb.
