How we rate food additives: the rules and the sources

LabelPeek rates food additives by membership rather than by risk: an entry is either a marker of industrial processing or it is not. The published reference holds 74 entries, 70 of them markers, and every regulatory statement attached to one names the document it was taken from.

This page sets out the rules the food side of this site works by — what a marker claims and what it refuses to claim, where the data comes from and under which licence, how a regulatory fact is worded, what happens to the text you paste into a checker, and where this whole method is the wrong one to reach for.

What a marker of industrial processing claims

A marker of industrial processing is a substance that does not appear in a domestic kitchen and reaches food only on a production line. Naming one is a statement about technology, checkable against the printed label by anyone holding the pack. It is not a statement about health, and this site makes none about any substance.

The boundary is imperfect, and saying so is part of the method. Xanthan gum and steviol glycosides sit on supermarket shelves for home bakers, so a purist could argue them out of the set. Four entries — annatto, carmine, ascorbic acid and tocopherols — are held in the dictionary precisely so the checker recognises them and flags nothing.

A membership claim can be checked by eye against a list printed on the same page. A claim about what a substance does to a body cannot be checked that way at all, which is why this site does not make one.

The four rules this site works by

Four rules govern every food page here, and they are written down so a reader can hold the site to them: claim membership and never harm, name the document behind every regulatory fact, publish no verdict about any named brand’s product, and keep the label you paste on your own device rather than on a server.

1. Step 1

   Claim membership, never harm

   The only assertion made about a substance is that it is or is not on a published list, with the job it does in food beside it. The vocabulary of health claims is absent from the data by design, because a structured field cannot carry the conditions such a claim would need.

2. Step 2

   Name the document behind every regulatory fact

   A regulatory statement is written only when it can be tied to a citable document — 21 CFR 74.303, Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 Annex V, a Federal Register notice, a state statute. The reference prints alongside the fact so a reader can go and read the original.

3. Step 3

   Publish no verdict about a named product

   No page on this site says that a named brand’s product is good, bad or anything in between. Verdicts about a specific company’s goods are a legal question rather than an editorial one, and the answer here is a flat no rather than a careful yes.

4. Step 4

   Keep the pasted label on the reader’s device

   A checker reads only text a reader types or pastes in. Matching happens in the browser against a list shipped with the page, and nothing is uploaded, stored, indexed or published. There is no account step and no email gate anywhere in the flow.

Where the additive data comes from

The additive dictionary behind this site is hand-written rather than imported. Facts come from documents that are public domain in the United States, chiefly the eCFR and FDA guidance, or from European Commission material reusable commercially under Decision 2011/833/EU, which covers the text of Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 and its amendments.

Entries are matched by more than their formal name. The 74 entries carry 332 label spellings between them, so the same substance is caught whether a pack prints an E number, a US declaration name such as FD&C Yellow No. 5, or a trade spelling. Fuzzy matching by edit distance is left out on purpose: sorbitol and sorbitan are one character apart, and a confident wrong answer about food is worse than an honest miss.

Why this is not a mirror of Open Food Facts

Copying an existing open database was the obvious shortcut and was rejected deliberately. Open Food Facts is released under ODbL 1.0, whose share-alike clause creates licence obligations for anyone who distributes a derived database, and its coverage of US shelves has never been measured here. A small hand-checked dictionary was chosen instead.

How a regulatory statement is worded here

A regulatory statement on this site names its document, states a jurisdiction, and carries a date whenever the document sets one. Red 40 requires the EU label statement about activity and attention in children under Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008, Annex V. Nothing is paraphrased into something firmer than the source actually says.

Two entries show the pattern most clearly. Titanium dioxide was removed from the EU list of permitted food additives by Regulation (EU) 2022/63, effective 7 February 2022, and remains permitted in the US at up to 1% by weight of the food under 21 CFR 73.575 — one substance, two regulators, two different answers, which is why titanium dioxide across two jurisdictions gets its own page. Red 3 is a dated sequence rather than a status: the FDA revoked the food authorisation on 15 January 2025, with the ban taking effect 15 January 2027 for food, recorded at 90 FR 4628 and 21 CFR 74.303.

A regulator’s decision is a fact about that regulator, and it stops there. Removal from an EU list, a revoked US authorisation and a state schools ban are three different administrative acts with three different reasons behind them, and none of them converts into a statement about what a substance does to a person. That is the whole distance between what the Red 40 rule requires and a verdict on a bag of candy.

What a checker does with the text you paste

A checker on this site reads only text a reader pastes in, matches it in the browser against a list shipped with the page, and keeps nothing afterwards. No ingredient text reaches a server, no result is stored or indexed, and no result is published anywhere. Closing the tab removes it.

That design decision does two jobs at once. It removes the privacy question entirely, since there is no upload to secure and no history to leak, and it settles the legal perimeter, because a result that is never published is never a statement about anybody’s goods. The ultra-processed food checker works this way, and so does the pore-clogging tool on the cosmetics side.

The review commitment

Every regulatory claim in the dictionary carries the document it came from, and the complete set was checked against primary sources on 10 August 2026. Where a fact could not be tied to a document, no statement was written at all, which is why 49 of the 74 entries carry no regulatory note whatever rather than a vague one.

This is the part of the data that ages fastest. State legislatures pass food statutes on their own timetable, the FDA revokes authorisations with compliance dates years out, and the EU amends Annexes without warning a website first. The commitment is therefore narrow and testable: the source reference travels with the fact, so any reader can check the entry against the original document rather than against this site’s word for it.

Corrections work in the same direction. When a document changes, the affected entry changes and the printed list changes with it, because the list is generated from the same data the checker matches against. There is no second copy of these facts kept in prose somewhere else to drift out of step.

When this method is the wrong one

This method is the wrong one whenever the question turns on quantity, on a specific branded product, or on an individual’s health. A list of names cannot see how much of a substance is in a food, where it sits in the order, how often somebody eats it, or how one body responds compared with another.

Allergen questions belong with the allergen declaration printed on the pack, which is a legal instrument this site is not. Nutrition questions — calories, sodium, portion size — sit outside the dictionary completely. And a supermarket aisle is a poor fit for a tool that asks you to retype a label, which is exactly the gap a barcode scanner fills.

Nothing here is medical or dietary advice, and no page on this site publishes a verdict about a named brand’s product. Questions about a specific diet belong with a registered dietitian or a doctor, who can weigh a whole week of eating instead of one printed list.

The full list, printed with its sources

Below is every marker the food checker can flag, grouped by the job each one does on a production line. Where an entry carries a regulatory statement, the document behind it prints directly underneath, so the fact can be verified against its source rather than taken on trust.