At the 26th Cosmed Regulatory Congress on 1 April 2026, Vanessa Picot, Deputy Head of Office 5B at the DGCCRF (Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control), responsible for cosmetics, presented a review of the 2024–2025 GMP inspection campaign, outlining key areas for attention and also focusing on export certificates.
For the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) inspections in 2024/2025 (Q2 to Q2), the DGCCRF had set itself a target of around 100 inspections.
As a reminder, an inspection is generally carried out by one to five inspectors, over a period of two to five days.
It begins with an opening meeting, followed by a desk-based review of all documentation relating to GMP. This is followed by the on-site phase, and the inspection concludes with a closing meeting. No documents are handed over during this final meeting. All identified non-compliances are reported verbally, which, in the words of Vanessa Picot, already enables the company to take action.
The 2024–2025 inspections
To date, 86 establishments have been inspected by 141 inspectors (including 17 specialist technical officers, known as ‘senior inspectors’) deployed across France, sometimes accompanied by inspectors from the national level. Of these, approximately 50% were subcontracting sites and 50% were brand-affiliated factories.
The DGCCRF is committed to targeting its inspections at all types of cosmetics businesses: whilst 10% focused on very large operators (more than 250 employees), they actually covered businesses of all sizes (11% for operators with 100 to 150 employees, 24% for those with 20 to …
