On 13 May 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Case C-483/24, a preliminary ruling that will resonate across the entire European food retail sector. The case arose from criminal proceedings brought by the Belgian Public Prosecutor before the Cour d’appel de Liège against Aldi SA, the Belgian subsidiary of the global discount retail giant, following repeated official findings of rodent droppings, gnawed food products, and pest traces in several of the company’s retail outlets and at least one warehouse. The proceedings culminated in a reference for a preliminary ruling lodged by the Belgian Cour de cassation on 10 July 2024, asking the Court of Justice to resolve a question of fundamental importance for food safety enforcement across the Union.
The legal question: obligation of means or obligation of result?
The referring court was the Belgian Cour de cassation, acting upon the appeal of the Procureur général près la Cour d’appel de Liège against Aldi SA. The question it posed to Luxembourg was deceptively technical but carried significant practical weight: do the hygiene obligations imposed by Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 on food business operators constitute an obligation as to the result to be achieved — such that the mere detection of pest traces in shops and warehouses suffices, absent force majeure or unavoidable error, to establish a breach — or merely an obligation to use best practices, meaning that proof of the operator’s failure to take all possible preventive steps is additionally required?
The specific provisions at issue were Article 4(2) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 and several sections of Annex II thereto, in particular paragraph 2(c) of Chapter I, paragraph 1(a) of Chapter V, and paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 of Chapter IX. These provisions govern, respectively, the general structural requirements of food premises, the obligation to protect food against contamination, and the requirements for pest control and the management of waste. The stakes were clear: if the obligations are merely those of best hygiene practices, a food operator could be acquitted simply by demonstrating that it had put some pest-control measures in place, regardless of whether those measures proved effective. Lower Belgian courts had indeed acquitted Aldi on precisely this logic.
The Advocate General’s opinion
In her Opinion delivered on 26 March 2026, Advocate General Kokott took the view that repeatedly detected pest contamination over several months, capable of rendering food unfit for human consumption and found in, on and in the immediate vicinity of food products at the marketing stage, is sufficient to establish an infringement by food business operators of their obligations under EU food hygiene law. Her reasoning was anchored in the protective purpose of the Regulation and in the primary responsibility that EU law unequivocally places on the food business operator as the first and principal guarantor of food safety. The Opinion provided the Court with a solid doctrinal foundation upon which to build its judgment.
The Court’s ruling
The CJEU’s judgment of 13 May 2026 confirmed and refined the Advocate General’s position. The Court held that the repeated detection of pest traces and droppings in retail premises and storage facilities is, in principle, sufficient to establish infringements of the key provisions of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, particularly where contaminated or gnawed food products are discovered or where risks to food safety are identified. Competent authorities are not required to demonstrate additionally that the operator failed to employ ‘all possible means’ to prevent the occurrence of pests.
This is a ruling of considerable doctrinal clarity. Rather than requiring national enforcement authorities to engage in the laborious and often inconclusive exercise of demonstrating what specific pest-control measures a food business operator failed to adopt, the Court placed the evidential logic firmly on observable outcome: the presence of pest traces is itself the proof of non-compliance, not merely a factual indicator from which non-compliance must be separately inferred.
At the same time, the Court introduced a meaningful distinction with respect to the structural requirements governing the physical characteristics of food premises. Regarding the obligations relating to the design and condition of premises specifically, the mere detection of pests is not automatically sufficient to establish a violation: it must additionally be demonstrated that the physical characteristics of the premises themselves preclude the implementation of adequate hygiene practices. This nuance is important: it prevents an overly mechanical application of the result-based logic to the design and maintenance of the fabric of buildings, where a single incident of pest ingress might conceivably occur even in a structurally compliant premises without implying any systemic deficiency.
The HACCP question
A further element of the ruling of direct relevance to food business operators is the Court’s treatment of HACCP-based (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) self-monitoring systems. The Court confirmed that documented HACCP procedures do not relieve operators from compliance with the general hygiene obligations laid down in Annex II of the Regulation. The existence of a management system does not discharge the substantive obligation to keep food premises and products free from pest contamination.
This is not a peripheral observation. A significant strand of the defence in cases of this kind rests on evidence that the operator had in place a documented HACCP plan, conducted regular audits, training programs (such as those provided by our FARE division) and engaged a licensed pest control contractor. The implicit argument is that conscientious adherence to a management system discharges the operator’s duty of care. The Court firmly rejected this conflation of procedural compliance with substantive compliance. A HACCP plan that fails to prevent the presence of rodent droppings in food storage areas is, by definition, a plan that has failed in its essential purpose. Its existence does not retroactively transform a contaminated warehouse into a compliant one.
This reasoning is entirely consistent with the general architecture of EU food law, which — since Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 establishing the general principles of food safety — has placed the primary responsibility for food safety on the food business operator, and has made that responsibility substantive, not merely procedural.
The regulatory framework in context
Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2021/382, represents the cornerstone of the EU hygiene package. It applies to all stages of the food chain after primary production and imposes graduated requirements depending on the nature of the food business activity. For retail and wholesale operators — the category to which Aldi SA manifestly belongs — the obligations of Annex II are directly applicable and legally binding.
The Court’s reading of those obligations was unambiguously purposive: the Regulation pursues a high level of food safety and consumer protection, and food business operators bear primary responsibility for ensuring compliance with hygiene requirements throughout the food chain. This interpretive approach — reading specific obligations through the lens of the Regulation’s overarching objectives — means that ambiguities in the scope or character of individual obligations are to be resolved in favour of the interpretation that best protects public health and the integrity of the food chain, rather than in favour of the interpretation most convenient for the operator.
The boomerang effect: when litigation amplifies damage
There is an aspect of this case that deserves frank commentary, and it concerns not jurisprudence but corporate reputation.
Aldi is, by any measure, a formidable commercial success. Born in Essen from a modest family grocery shop co-managed by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht after the Second World War, the group today operates over 12,000 stores across more than 20 countries, generating annual revenues estimated in excess of €130 billion. Its business model — disciplined range curation, relentless cost control, private-label dominance, and aggressive expansion — has reshaped grocery retail across Europe and beyond. The group’s two entities, Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd, constitute one of the most recognised retail brands in the world.
Against this backdrop, the decision by Aldi SA — or, more precisely, the legal strategies deployed in the Belgian criminal proceedings — to resist conviction all the way to the Cour de cassation, and thereby trigger a preliminary reference to the CJEU, produced an outcome that is, from a communications standpoint, deeply counterproductive.
The case now bears the name Procureur général près la Cour d’appel de Liège v Aldi SA in the Official Journal of the European Union. The phrases ‘rodent droppings’ and ‘gnawed products’ appear in the formal published record of a Luxembourg judgment. The specific provisions of EU hygiene law under which Aldi was found — by the highest court of the EU — to have potentially committed criminal infringements are cited by reference to Aldi by name in the binding case law of the Union, accessible to every enforcement authority, court, academic, journalist, and competitor on the continent.
A brand that has invested enormous energy in promoting itself as the smart, trustworthy, affordable choice for millions of European consumers has, through the act of escalating a domestic criminal dispute to the EU’s supreme judicial body, secured permanent registration in EU case law as the company whose warehouses and retail outlets were found to harbour rats. The lower courts’ acquittals, which the company presumably sought to protect, have now been superseded by a CJEU ruling that clarifies, against Aldi’s own interests and for the benefit of all enforcement authorities, exactly how straightforward it is to establish a hygiene violation.
It is a textbook illustration of the boomerang effect in corporate litigation strategy: the attempt to obtain a definitive legal shield instead produced a definitive legal precedent — one that carries the company’s name in its title and will henceforth be invoked every time a food inspector finds evidence of pest activity in a supermarket or warehouse anywhere in the European Union.
Implications for the retail sector
The judgment in Case C-483/24 has immediate and concrete consequences for food retail and wholesale operators throughout the EU.
First, the ruling effectively raises the standard of liability for pest-related hygiene infringements. National enforcement authorities, which had in some jurisdictions been required to demonstrate not only the fact of contamination but also the operator’s procedural failure, may now establish a prima facie breach on the basis of inspection findings alone. This is likely to increase the frequency and severity of administrative and criminal sanctions in the sector.
Second, the ruling places renewed pressure on operators to ensure that pest-control systems deliver tangible results, not merely documented processes. Regular audits, training, contractor engagement, and written HACCP plans remain necessary — but they are no longer sufficient. The outcome must be compliance; the process is merely the means.
Third, the judgment has particular relevance for large-format retailers with geographically dispersed retail networks. The delegation of hygiene management to store-level staff, third-party contractors, or regional supervisors does not extinguish the legal responsibility of the food business operator at the top of the corporate structure. Aldi SA’s experience — where repeated findings across multiple outlets and a warehouse were attributed to the legal entity operating the business — illustrates the systemic exposure that corporate retail structures face when hygiene management is inconsistent across sites.
Finally, the ruling reinforces the principle that EU food law is enforcement law, not aspirational guidance. Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 imposes enforceable obligations, breach of which can — and in Belgium, did — attract criminal liability. The CJEU’s confirmation that those obligations are result-based, not effort-based, sends an unambiguous message to food business operators across the Union: the legal standard is not ‘we tried’; it is ‘we succeeded‘.
Dario Dongo
Credit cover Nathália Rosa su Unsplash
References
Court of Justice of the European Union. (2026, May 13). Judgment in Case C-483/24, Procureur général près la Cour d’appel de Liège v Aldi SA. ECLI:EU:C:2026:396. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62024CJ0483
Court of Justice of the European Union. (2024, October 7). Request for a preliminary ruling — Case C-483/24, Aldi SA. Official Journal of the European Union, C/2024/5788. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/C/2024/5788/oj/eng
Court of Justice of the European Union. (2026, March 26). Opinion of Advocate General Kokott in Case C-483/24, Aldi SA. Curia. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0a0cca1f-290d-11f1-a7dd-01aa75ed71a1/language-en
Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs. Consolidated text: 24/03/2021 http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2004/852/2021-03-24
Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 January 2002 laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety. Consolidated text: 01/01/2026 http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2002/178/2026-01-01
Dario Dongo, lawyer and journalist, PhD in international food law, founder of WIISE (FARE - GIFT - Food Times) and Égalité.
