With the rise of cross-border e-commerce and the upgrading of consumption in the domestic food market, Chinese consumers are increasingly interested in purchasing imported food online. At the same time, the related food safety risk issues have also started to attract the attention of regulatory authorities and researchers. This paper presents the current import management system and regulatory practices, and by focusing on the two major modes of cross-border e-commerce retail and online direct mail, it summarizes the safety regulatory loopholes and possible risks of online food imports, analyzes the main confusions faced by the customs department in food safety regulation, and tries to propose corresponding countermeasures. This paper analyzes the situation of imported food in China based on the public data from the regulatory authorities. After analyzing the existing policy regulations and the characteristics and trends of online food imports, the authors find that the customs department will face some confusions in the safety regulation of online food imports, for example, there exists a contradiction between encouraging the development of cross-border e-commerce retail business and safety regulation, the convenience arrangement of direct mail import mode will lead to blind spots in food safety regulation, the difficulty of traceability of online food imports directly restricts the whole chain regulation, and there is a sharp contradiction between the massive scale of imports and limited regulatory resources. The authors point out that in order to effectively address these regulatory challenges, efforts should be made to establish a multi-organizer collaborative governance system for online food safety, including consumers' rationality in purchasing overseas food, the need for platform operators to carry out the whole process of governance, the need for e-commerce companies to implement the main responsibility for food safety, the need for front-line regulation to rely on intelligence to improve efficiency, and the need for the General Administration of Customs to actively promote international cooperation. © 2021, Editorial Department of Journal of Food Science and Technology. All right reserved.
