The main condition to be met by producers on the Single European Market derives from strict technical requirements for industrial products, including processed food. Polish suppliers already have to comply with the rules when they export products and sell them in EU member states. With accession, the rules will have to be followed by all suppliers, including those operating on the local Polish market, as the free movement of goods implies that products are free to move around the EU.

EU technical standards constantly evolve but they are founded on a system ensuring confidence in products in terms of safety for humans and the environment. Until the early 1980s, the system relied on detailed mandatory technical standards and regulations developed by national standardisation institutions; mutual recognition was cumbersome. A breakthrough came with the 1979 judgment of the European Court of Justice which ruled that a product manufactured and marketed under the law of any European Community member state must be allowed to the market of any other member state; later, a mandatory procedure of notification on technical standards and regulations was put in place. The Community standardisation process is supervised by three institutions: CEN (European Committee for Standardisation), CENELEC (European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation), and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). The new approach (horizontal directives) was developed and published in 1985. It is based on several fundamental concepts:

• harmonisation of technical regulations of the member states is limited to essential, clearly defined requirements of product safety for humans and the environment;
• technical regulations ensuring conformity with the requirements are developed by competent organisations responsible for drafting technical standards;
• regulations adopted as technical standards harmonised across the European Union (mutually recognised by the member states) are not mandatory and are applied at the discretion of the manufacturer;
• the application of standards in the manufacturing of products implies that the products conform to the requirements of the relevant Directive; consequently, products manufactured according to harmonised standards benefit from the presumption of conformity with the safety requirements and allowed to be traded across the Single Market;
• since safety requirements are mandatory and are interpreted and applied uniformly in each EU member state, a producer who does not follow harmonised standards can use any method to design and manufacture products provided that the products are subject to conformity assessment procedures performed by an independent certifying institution and are certified as conforming to the requirements of the relevant directive. Only when all those procedures are fulfilled can the producer affix the CE mark which is the product’s passport of entry to the Single Market.

In the harmonisation of Polish legislation with EU regulations, all required framework laws necessary to introduce comparable technical regulations were adopted in 2000. These include: the Law on the Compliance and Accreditation System (amended by the Law on the Compliance Assessment System dated 1 January 2003, Journal of Laws No. 166, item 1360 from 2002), the Law on the Protection of Some Consumer Rights and Hazardous Product Liability (Journal of Laws No. 22, item 271), the Law on General Product Safety (Journal of Laws No. 15, item 179). Secondary legislation is being drafted.