Seb Melchor

Food and nutrition lawyer. Film director.

Sebastián Romero Melchor (Seb Melchor), is a Spanish lawyer and film director. Born in the Canary Islands, he read law at the University of Deusto and took an LLM in European law at the College of Europe, Bruges. He worked at the European Commission and at Uría Menéndez, and from 2003 to 2012 founded a boutique law firm in Brussels dedicated to food law, before moving his practice to K&L Gates, where he was a partner leading the food law practice from 2012 to 2015. In 2001 he founded the Boletín Europeo de Derecho Alimentario, an early online journal on food law in Spain that became the Revista de Derecho Alimentario in 2005, and he has since written around one hundred articles on EU food and nutrition regulation and given more than 75 conferences all over the world. He represented the Spanish food supplement industry in seminal Case C-88/07, Commission v Spain (2009), in which the Court of Justice held that Spain had to apply mutual recognition to herbal food supplements lawfully sold elsewhere in the EU and established a key demarcation between foods and medicines. He has served as president of the Asociación Española para el Derecho Alimentario, as deputy secretary-general of the Asociación Iberoamericana para el Derecho Alimentario, and as visiting professor in nutrition law at the University of the Balearic Islands.

In April 2015 The Legal 500 listed him as a top-tier food lawyer, and in May 2015 he co-founded Food Compliance International in Singapore, the specialist regulatory firm with which he remains associated as co-founder. That same year he studied at the New Zealand Film & Television School, where he was selected to direct the end-of-year short Maximilian The Great (2016), later invited to festivals in the United States and New Zealand. His earlier short, Drop-Dead Rich, had won the Audience Award at the Prague Film School.

Between 2018 and about 2023 he also ran Intemperie Art Productions in Singapore, a small venture that funded young sculptors and dealt in contemporary art. After some sabbatical years he is now back practicing food law, he sits on the board of the ultra-premium pet-nutrition brand LOONAWELL, and his most recent legal writing is a chapter on the labelling of probiotics in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Food Law (2025), written with Ada Dunin-Imbro. He works in Spanish, English, French and Italian, lives in Tokyo, and is developing a first feature film ("The Trial of Jesus Christ").

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