Functional foods are defined as “Foods that may provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition”. Functional dairy products are the key product sector accounting for sales of around 1.35 billion US$ in 1999 in Europe. Probiotic dairy products are constituted an important part of functional dairy foods. In order to bring probiotics to the consumer, the food industry has been mostly using fermented dairy products. In functional foods sector that included different legal definitions and applications, Japan is first model and has important developments. This review will focus on evaluation of probiotics from a wide perspective by using new literature data, and discussion of Japan model for legal arrangements and labeling.