New Zealand's organic rules are being rewritten. You have until 22 September to say something.

Three instruments, three different dates

The system rests on three pieces of law, and they do not all bite at the same time.

The Organic Products and Production Act 2023 is in force. It received Royal assent on 5 April 2023 and commenced the following day. It sets the purposes of the regime, which section 3 states as increasing consumer confidence when purchasing products described as organic, increasing certainty for businesses making organic claims, and facilitating international trade in organic products. It also creates the offences, the approval and recognition framework, and the public register.

The Organic Products and Production Regulations 2025 came into force on 3 October 2025. These are the operating regulations: how you apply for approval, what an organic management plan must contain, how groups of operators work, tracing and recall obligations, how verifiers are recognised, and how often you get verified.

The Organic Standards Regulations 2025 come into force on 31 March 2028. These are the production and processing rules themselves, and regulation 10 brings all six standards into force on that same date: plants, plant products and fungi; wild harvest; livestock; aquaculture products; bees and bee products; and processed products.

From 31 March 2028, a business making an organic claim about food, beverages, plant or animal products will need to be approved by MPI, comply with the relevant Organic Standards Regulations, and undergo independent verification, unless it is exempt. That applies to domestic sale as well as export.

Two and a half years sounds like a long time. It is not, for a perennial crop under conversion, or for anyone who has to build an organic management plan and a document control system from scratch.

What MPI is actually asking

MPI Discussion Paper 2026/05 was released in August 2026. It is deliberately narrow. In MPI's own framing, this is not about redesigning the organic regulatory system; it is a limited set of operational and implementation matters. The reason for consulting now is that the detailed notices supporting the Organic Standards Regulations were developed in late 2025 and early 2026, and that work surfaced problems in both sets of regulations before anyone has had to comply with them.

There are four areas.

1. The exemption threshold. Regulations 132(1) and 132(2)(b) exempt a person with organic turnover under $10,000 a year from the requirement to be approved. MPI is asking whether that should stay, rise to $30,000 to match the zero-levy band in the forthcoming cost recovery regulations, rise to $12,700 to account for inflation since 2021, or be set somewhere else. We look at this in the exemption threshold post.

2. Infringement offences. MPI proposes introducing infringement notices for minor, administrative non-compliance, with five severity categories and an escalation mechanism for repeat offences. This would be new to organics. We look at it in the infringement notices post.

3. Minor and technical amendments. Around several dozen drafting fixes across both sets of regulations, set out in Appendix 2. MPI is explicit that these are not policy changes. Some of them are considerably more practical than that framing suggests, and we go through the ones that will change what an operator actually does in the 2028 standards post.

4. A national organic mark. Section 133(1)(d) of the Act allows regulations to provide for a national mark. MPI is asking whether there should be one mark for domestic and export use, separate marks, or no regulated mark at all, and what it should look like. Feedback here feeds a full design consultation in 2027. We look at it in the national organic mark post.

Why a small consultation is worth your time

Consultations on drafting fixes attract very few submissions. That is exactly why they matter. The Organic Standards Regulations still contain, in regulation 13(3), a rule that an operator may use an acceptable input if they "think" it is needed. MPI itself points out that this is close to unenforceable, because an operator can simply assert what they thought. That word survived the drafting process, the 2021 and 2022 consultations, and being made by Order in Council in September 2025. It is being fixed now because people who read the regulations closely said something.

The same is true of the conversion period problem in regulation 41(4), which as drafted prevents land conversion and plant conversion from running at the same time. For a perennial orchard, that is not a technicality. It is years.

How to submit

Submissions must be received no later than 11:59pm on 22 September 2026, through either:

• the online form at mpi.surveymonkey.com/r/8PGC3G5, or
• email to organicsconsultation@mpi.govt.nz

Include the title of the discussion document, your name and title, your organisation's name if you are submitting on its behalf and whether the view is the organisation's or your own, and your contact details.

Submissions can be requested under the Official Information Act 1982. If part of your submission is commercially sensitive, say so and give your grounds, and MPI will consider it under the Act. That is worth knowing before you write, not after.

You do not have to answer all 17 questions. A submission that answers one question well, from direct operating experience, is more useful to a policy team than a submission that agrees with everything.

What we are doing

ANZOC is shared data infrastructure for the trans-Tasman organic sector: the directory and compliance tooling that lets a certified operator be found and verified once, then used everywhere. We have a commercial interest in how the register and any national mark are designed, and we say so in our own submission rather than leaving it to be inferred.

The rest of this series works through each proposal in turn, with the regulation numbers, so you can check us.