Ten years ago, I woke up to a result I still haven’t fully made peace with.
I’m a British citizen living in Austria, and Austria doesn’t permit dual nationality. So ten years after the Brexit referendum, my choice not to relinquish my UK passport leaves me in a kind of bureaucratic limbo that affects my daily life in ways most people writing Brexit retrospectives today simply don’t experience. I can’t vote in Austrian elections. My residency paperwork gives me a ten-year reprieve, as long as I keep paying for it. And every time I travel on a British passport through an EU border, I need to produce that right-to-residency paperwork.
I say this not for sympathy, but for context. When I look at what Brexit has done to food and drink trade over the past decade, I’m not reading the data from a distance. I’m living inside it every day where I work with companies living through the challenges for food and drink exporters on both sides of the Channel.
This isn’t a dry policy review. It is my practical account of what happened to one of the most commercially important cross-Channel trade relationships in the world – written from the European side of the Channel, where far too little of this conversation takes place.
Table of Contents
Brexit impact on food trade: the numbers are genuinely bad
Let’s start with the UK side of the ledger.
According to the Food and Drink Federation, UK food and drink exports to the EU fell by 34% between 2020 and 2025. EU food export volumes in 2025 were still nearly a third (31%) lower than their 2019 levels. (The fact that the values have increased only highlights another issue, the explosion of costs). The FDF’s own 2025 Trade Snapshot notes that “the export volume graph underlines how UK exports have structurally reset at a lower level since 2020.” On a global scale there was some volume recovery in 2025, but total food export volumes were still more than a quarter (27%) lower than in 2019.
To be clear: this is a full reset, not a story about a temporary post-pandemic dip. The trade relationships that took decades to build, the shelf presence that British brands worked hard to earn across European grocery, the buyer relationships that were a phone call away – much of that has been quietly eroding while businesses have been drowning in paperwork.
And the paperwork issue is not an abstraction. A logistics company owner told a House of Commons committee it was “pure hell” to acquire the documentation required to export lamb and beef to the EU – 26 separate stamps on a single consignment, compared to a single sheet of paper before Brexit. For a fresh produce business where every hour matters, that is a structural collapse in commercial viability, not simply an administrative inconvenience. Sanitary controls on food trade alone cost traders around £54 million every year, according to HSBC Global Investment Research – and that is before you add the wider cost of border checks, estimated at £4.7 billion between 2016 and 2024.
Of course, you could argue that this is a fundamental issue of the EU, and to some extent I’d agree, BUT it never bothered the UK when they were protected by that same administration because of being on the inside. This isn’t the EU taking any kind of revenge on the UK for leaving, it’s simply the status quo for non-members.
The Centre for European Reform found that customs paperwork and delays now add an estimated €10 billion annually to the cost of trading with the UK. That cost does not disappear. It gets absorbed into margins, passed on to consumers, or it becomes the reason a European SME quietly decides the UK is no longer worth the effort.
Around 16,000 British businesses stopped exporting food products to the EU after Brexit altogether – not reduced their exports, but stopped entirely. The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit has reduced long-run productivity by around 4%, and trade with Europe is on course to be around 15% lower in the long run, with trade deals with non-EU countries not making a meaningful difference to that gap.
Exports to some specific EU markets tell an even starker story. Between 2021 and 2025, UK food and drink exports to Germany dropped almost 60%. Exports to Poland more than halved. Belgium was down nearly 40%.
The categories hit hardest
Not all food and drink categories are equal in this story.
The SPS (Sanitary and Phytosanitary) framework governs products like meat, dairy, eggs, fish and fresh produce. These categories faced the most immediate disruption – and the most visible bureaucratic burden. Whole categories of product effectively became unviable to move across the border. Fresh sausages and burgers couldn’t be exported to the EU at all under post-Brexit rules. Certain shellfish and seed potatoes were blocked entirely. The Windsor Framework created a trade border in the Irish Sea that forced businesses serving Northern Ireland to navigate a two-tier system that continues to cause operational headaches.
But the non-SPS categories – categories such as chocolate, biscuits, breakfast cereals, confectionery, ambient beverages – tell a different and arguably more underappreciated story. These are precisely the categories where British brands had strong European recognition and genuine shelf presence. These brands weren’t selling into Europe because of any regulatory mandate. They were there because European consumers wanted them. And yet the FDF’s 2025 data shows these non-SPS categories have seen some of the steepest export declines of all over the past five years. The barrier was not a product standard. It was customs paperwork, cost, and complexity – and it quietly killed market presence that had taken years to build.
(And whilst it may be small in the greater scheme of things: I can no longer get my preferred brand of dark chocolate digestives in Austria. I mention this not as a trade statistic, but as a daily reminder of what frictionless trade meant in practice.)
The continental side is less discussed, but equally real challenges for EU exporters exist
Most Brexit trade commentary focuses on the challenges for food and drink exporters in the UK. But European food and drink companies exporting into the UK have taken a significant hit too – and this story gets far less airtime.
The Centre for European Reform’s research points to a 20% reduction in EU food and drink exports to the UK since Brexit, with customs delays and increased paperwork cited as the primary causes. EU imports into the UK grew by 1.9% in value in Q1 2026, but that is a recovery of sorts from a much lower base. The UK’s Border Target Operating Model (BTOM), which introduced health certificates and physical checks on EU imports only in 2024 – a full four years after Brexit – finally brought some compliance symmetry, but also added costs that European exporters had not originally budgeted for.
One business owner described the experience plainly: “In 2021, the UK left the EU single market without providing any guidelines, support, or plan on how to manage imports and exports to and from the EU. Due to the uncertain environment, we have been facing enormous challenges: additional checks at customs, new regulations, updated label information, and raised duty. Above all, we had to open a new company in the EU to export from the Italian distillery, move resources to the EU, and slowly disinvest from the UK headquarters. For decades, the UK and London have been the most efficient hubs in the world for building a global business. I am still amazed at how we could ruin everything in such a short time.”
That last observation should carry some weight in any honest reckoning with the past decade. Companies couldn’t simply absorb the additional cost. Instead, many restructured away from Britain. London, which had genuinely been one of the most important platforms for a European or international brand seeking a global footprint, became less attractive precisely because the infrastructure around trading in and through the UK became more expensive and more complicated.
For small and mid-sized European food and drink producers (which describe the majority of the sector by number of companies, if not by volume) the UK calculation changed fundamentally. The Export Health Certificates required per consignment cost up to £200 each. For a small-batch producer moving weekly shipments, that alone could run into thousands of pounds per year. Many simply concluded the numbers no longer justified the effort required.
The macro picture adding to the challenges of food and drinks exporters
The food and drink sector does not exist in isolation. The broader economic context matters.
Stanford economists estimate that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by between 6% and 8%, reflecting “a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources.” The Office for Budget Responsibility’s long-run productivity assumption is a 4% reduction – and by 2025, the UK was running five index points behind the EU on the same 2016 economic baseline.
The pound’s persistent weakness has compounded this. Sterling has operated around 10% below its June 2016 value. For a country that imports considerably more food than it exports, a structurally weaker pound has fed directly into food price inflation adding to the challenges for food and drink exporters. Researchers estimated that by November 2026, retail food prices in the UK will have risen by 50% in the five years since 2021. The preceding 50% rise had taken around 20 years to achieve. Obviously Brexit is not solely responsible for that compression (the pandemic, the Ukraine war and the energy shock all contributed) but it is a significant and persistent thread running through it.
There is also a labour dimension that is often overlooked in trade discussions. The end of freedom of movement removed the workforce pipeline on which much of the UK food industry had relied – from seasonal farm picking to food manufacturing to hospitality. In August 2021, trade organisations warned that labour shortages were creating difficulties “across the full breadth of the supply chain.” Those shortages raised costs in production, processing, retail and catering, all of which fed into consumer prices.
A June 2026 YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons now believe leaving the EU was wrong, versus 30% who believe it was right. That’s a remarkable shift in public opinion over ten years. It doesn’t change the immediate commercial reality, but it does reflect a broad reckoning with where the evidence has landed.
The reset deal: genuine cause for cautious optimism
There is however at least a glimmer of hope if you’re facing food export challenges post-Brexit.
In May 2025, the UK and EU agreed a new Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement – a food and veterinary deal that will allow for dynamic alignment of the UK’s food safety rules with those of the EU. When implemented, routine border checks on a broad range of agrifood products will be removed. Export Health Certificates, (remember I mentioned they cost up to £200 per consignment), will no longer be required for SPS-covered goods. Fresh sausages, burgers, certain shellfish and seed potatoes will be tradeable across the Channel again for the first time since Brexit.
For businesses that move multiple consignments per week, the savings could run into thousands of pounds per year. The UK government estimates the deal could add £5.1 billion annually to the economy and as much as £9 billion by 2040. The FDF has projected a potential increase of more than 20% in agrifood exports to the EU once the deal is implemented.
That figure carries an important caveat though: even a 20% uplift would still leave UK food and drink exports noticeably below the 34% already lost. The reset is a meaningful step forward but it’s not a restoration.
There are also notable categories still outside the agreement’s scope. Confectionery, ambient grocery, biscuits and beverages fall under customs and labelling rules that the SPS agreement does not address. For those categories, the structural barriers remain largely in place, and the path to recovery is considerably less clear.
Implementation timing is also worth watching carefully. The agreement is expected to take full effect from mid-2027. There are hopes that trade in dairy products, eggs, fish and fresh red meat specifically will begin to ease by summer 2027. A deal on paper is not a deal in practice though until border processes actually change, and many firms are already responding to uncertainty around implementation timelines by tightening their belts and delaying investment decisions. That is a cost in itself.
Two thirds of businesses surveyed in the UK government’s call for information highlighted reduced compliance costs as the key benefit they anticipated from the new agreement. Around half pointed to improved market access and reduced import costs. But some businesses expect one-off reconfiguration costs, and others are concerned about ongoing supply chain adjustments. The SPS agreement, as the FDF’s Karen Betts put it directly, “won’t be easy.”
What this means if you work in food and drink trade
If you are a UK food or drink producer
who pulled back from EU markets between 2021 and 2025 because the paperwork became unmanageable – the SPS agreement is worth engaging with seriously now, ahead of mid-2027 implementation.
The questions to ask:
- Is your product category covered?
- Have you maintained the buyer or importer relationship in your target EU market, or does that need to be rebuilt?
- Do you have a distributor who understands the new regime?
The FDF is urging government to ensure businesses have sector-specific guidance; connect with them if you have not already.
If you are a European food or drink business
that downgraded your UK market ambitions after Brexit, now is a reasonable time to reassess your strategy. The UK remains a large, English-speaking, premium-friendly consumer market. The £66.9 billion import figure for 2025 demonstrates that British consumers are still buying European food and drink at scale. The friction has not disappeared, but it is likely to reduce. Non-SPS categories still face customs complexity, but for SPS-covered products the calculation is changing.
If you are in confectionery, beverages, ambient grocery or other non-SPS categories
Keep your eyes open. The SPS agreement doesn’t help you directly, and the structural barriers remain. The long game here is about customs procedure simplification, mutual labelling recognition, and ongoing UK-EU regulatory dialogue – none of which will deliver quickly.
If you are an SME on either side
the FDF is right that you have been disproportionately burdened. The administrative and compliance costs that large multinationals can absorb hit smaller exporters hardest – and 16,000 businesses stopping EU trade entirely is largely a small-business story. The SPS agreement’s removal of EHCs could genuinely change the maths for producers who were previously priced out of EU trade.
One note of caution worth adding: the current trade environment is not only a Brexit story. US tariff uncertainty has hit UK food export volumes to America hard – exports to the US fell by 27.9% in value in Q1 2026 – and the Middle East situation is adding logistics costs and supply chain complexity on top of existing pressures. UK food export volumes in Q1 2026 fell to their lowest level in a decade outside the pandemic. The FDF described the situation bluntly as a “storm brewing” for UK food and drink competitiveness. The SPS reset is necessary but not sufficient on its own.
Ten years on the challenges for food and drink exporters remain
I don’t think Brexit was worth it for one minute. I am not ashamed to state that plainly or to call out the lies (on both sides) that led to the appalling decision.
Millions of young Europeans lost their automatic right to move, study and work freely across the continent – privileges that I enjoyed in the past. At a moment in history when European security has rarely demanded more collective resolve, the UK chose to distance itself from Europe’s most successful peace project. And that is before getting into the promises made – the bus, the money, the trade deals that were going to replace everything and more. The data does not support the case that was made.
The personal cost to people like me – Britons who built lives, businesses, and communities in Europe or Europeans who live and work in the UK – has never really been part of the mainstream conversation in the way it should be. We are a footnote in the economic modelling, if we appear at all.
But I am more interested in what comes next than in rehashing what happened.
The reset is real, if incomplete. It is at least a step in the right direction, and the food and drink sector should approach the implementation period with both cautious optimism and clear-eyed planning. The opportunity to begin rebuilding trade relationships is there, if businesses are willing and able to invest in it.
The question I put to everyone reading this: if you are a food or drink business on either side of the Channel, have you actually revisited your export strategy in light of the SPS agreement – or are you still operating on your 2021 assumptions?
Because ten years of standing still is already too long.
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Kathryn firmly believes that business is done between people, and therefore places her focus on building strong relationships that form a solid foundation for doing business.
When she's not travelling around the world, Kathryn enjoys playing clarinet in her town's wind orchestra or sharing her love of the outdoors with her Scout group.
