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About product notifications
All manufacturers and importers (notifiers) of vaping, herbal smoking and smokeless tobacco products (notifiable products) must notify the Ministry of Health about the products they intend to sell in New Zealand. There is a $50 plus GST per product fee (renewed annually) for the processing of the product notification.
Manufacturers and importers must:
- submit a product notification for each product they intend to sell or supply, including parts or components if they are intended to be sold separately
- notify replacement parts for a device as a device notification
- notify different container sizes or nicotine strengths of the same brand or product under a single notification (and will attract only one notification fee)
- withdraw an existing notification and submit a new one if the product has a significant change, such as changing an ingredient or the concentration of nicotine.
All products must comply with the relevant product safety requirements outlined in the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Regulations 2021 before they can be notified. Each manufacturer or importer of a product must complete their own notification for products they sell or supply, even if they have already been notified by someone else.
Notifications must be renewed every 12 months or they will expire. Manufacturers and importers must also complete a new notification, and cancel their existing notification, for a product if it undergoes a significant change after it has been notified.
The Ministry of Health may suspend or cancel product notifications, although manufacturers and importers have the right to appeal to an independent Appeals Committee about a proposed suspension or cancellation.
The Ministry may also ensure products do not pose an unacceptable risk of harm by:
- declaring maximum limits for substances within a product
- declaring substances that are prohibited for use in a product
- requiring information about the safety of a product
- issuing public warnings about the safety of a product
- issuing a recall notice for a product.
Notifiers of notifiable products are responsible for withdrawing their notifiable products if they do not meet new packaging and product safety requirements under the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Regulations 2021. The Ministry will not cancel these in the HARP system for you.
Retailers who purchase from manufacturers and importers do not need to notify their products – only manufacturers and importers need to notify the products they sell.
How to notify vaping and other notifiable products you want to sell
Manufacturers and importers can notify products via the Health Advisory and Regulatory Platform (HARP).
Find out more about applying on our HARP user guide page.
Once you have access to HARP, you need to log in and provide details of the products you intend to sell in New Zealand by completing a Product Notification.
The information you will be required to provide in your notification depends on which of the following product types it is:
- Freebase Nicotine Vaping Substance (a vaping e-liquid where the nicotine is in freebase form)
- Nicotine Salts Vaping Substance (a vaping e-liquid where the nicotine is in salt form)
- Vaping Device (the device alone, with no vaping substance. Can include device components such as coils)
- Kit (meaning a package with 2 or more items in this list, for example a vaping device and a vaping substance packaged together)
- Smokeless Tobacco Product
- Herbal Smoking Product (loose mix, with no tobacco)
- Herbal Smoking Product (in a cigarette form, with no tobacco)
A smokeless tobacco product refers to a tobacco product that is designed and sold to be used in a way that does not involve ignition or combustion. A common smokeless tobacco products is heated tobacco products, which generally use heat to aerosolise nicotine from the tobacco, rather than by burning it like a traditional cigarette.
If you are notifying a ‘kit’, the individual components of the kit must also be separately notified. For example, a single-use vaping device that comes with a vaping substance can be notified, however, the device itself and the vaping substance in included in the kit must also be notified separately. When submitting the product notification for the vaping kit, you should apply for a fee waiver as you would have already paid the relevant fees when notifying the components separately.
There is a fee for each product notified, currently $50 plus GST per product (renewed annually), as well as any card processing fees. Once payment has been received, the products will generally become notified automatically and they will appear on the Notified Products Database immediately. However, if the product contains a prohibited ingredient, the notification will go to the Ministry for a product review.
Help and guidance for product notifications
SERPA regulations
The Regulations detail the requirements for product packaging and product safety. Read the regulations on the Legislation website
Product notification guide
These guides talk you through what the process is in the HARP Portal and outline what information you are required to provide for each of the product types you have to notify:
Refer to the information below for guidance about ingredients, packaging and what overseas manufacturers need to do.
Product ingredients
If you have the full chemical breakdown of flavour ingredients for your products, then these should be included in your notification. If you do not, then we accept a list of common ingredient names.
We would ideally collect a full chemical breakdown for each product during the notification process, and this was what was envisaged by the legislation, but we recognise that the makeup of many flavours will be proprietary to the flavour manufacturer. At this stage, we therefore accept flavours to be both notified and listed on labels using their brand name and variant (e.g. Capella Sweet Strawberry, E-Flavours Banana).
If a product has two or more proprietary flavours, then the label should list them separately but any breakdown in the notification can be for the product as a whole. If the flavour brand name and variant is also proprietary then a generic flavour name can be used on the product label but the proprietary name should be included on the notification (and marked as proprietary).
If an overseas manufacturer will not provide a breakdown of a flavour’s ingredients, please send a separate email to [email protected], including the manufacturer contact details and a list of the products. We will then investigate possible options for obtaining full chemical breakdowns for flavours to assist with our product safety monitoring. You will not be allowed to sell these products in New Zealand until we have received the information from the overseas manufacturer.
We have allowed vaping substances to be notified with multiple nicotine strengths so the amount of each ingredient will change depending on nicotine strength, and the weight field in the HARP system (and in the Excel template) will accept a range of concentrations in mg/100mL to accommodate this rather than just a single value.
Overseas manufacturers
We have received requests from overseas manufacturers to access the Ministry’s HARP system so they can notify vaping, herbal smoking and smokeless tobacco products. NZ notifiers are responsible for notifying the products they wish to sell, and we cannot give HARP access to people based outside of New Zealand. We suggest that overseas manufacturers who sell products to NZ importers provide their customers with a CSV file containing the required information about their products in the correct format to be uploaded to the HARP system during the product notification process.
We have provided an Excel template on our website to assist with this. A CSV file in the correct format can be exported from the desktop version of Excel by selecting the sheet containing the product data and doing File, Save As, and selecting ‘CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv)’ from the file format drop-down list. There will be a warning to say that CSV files don’t support multiple sheets but that is okay providing you were viewing the correct sheet.
If manufacturers don’t have the desktop version of Excel, then they may be able to create a suitable CSV file using another spreadsheet application. Alternatively, they can email a copy of the completed Excel template to [email protected] then we can convert it into the correct CSV format.
Products that are imported by more than one notifier will need to be notified separately so overseas manufacturers may need to provide the CSV file to each of their NZ customers.
The Ministry of Health is aware that some international manufacture orders can take a long time to arrive from overseas. Please note you only need to notify your products before they are offered for sale in New Zealand – you can purchase and import them from overseas without a current notification.
We can only provide general information about the operation of the Act. If you have questions about how the legislation applies to you and your particular circumstances, then we recommend you seek legal advice.
