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This is not medical advice, not a safety assessment and not a recommendation to buy or avoid anything. It looks up a product’s published ingredient list and shows what the European Food Safety Authority has concluded about the additives in it, with a link to each opinion so you can read the source. Nothing here is written or reviewed by a toxicologist, and no product is scored by us.
The colours describe an additive, not this jar. EFSA’s overexposure findings are about how much of a substance people eat across a whole diet, measured against the amount considered safe. A red badge does not mean this product is dangerous, and it does not tell you how much is in it.
Grey means we found nothing, and that is genuinely different from green. Only a few dozen additives carry an EFSA overexposure verdict at all. An ingredient with no badge has not been assessed here — it has not been assessed and cleared.
This covers food additives only. Cosmetics, cleaning products and household goods are regulated under completely different regimes and none of that data is here. Ingredient lists come from Open Food Facts, which is built by volunteers photographing labels, so they can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong — check the packet.
Additive data from the Open Food Facts additives taxonomy, used under the Open Database Licence. EFSA opinions are linked individually above.
Type in a barcode and it looks the product up in Open Food Facts, shows the ingredient list as printed on the label, and then marks each additive with what the European Food Safety Authority has actually concluded about it — with a link to the opinion, so you can read the source rather than take our word for it.
That last part is the whole design. The colours are not our opinion of an ingredient. Red means EFSA compared what people really eat against the amount considered safe and found a high risk of exceeding it. Green means EFSA looked and did not find that. Every badge carries its citation, so if you disagree you can argue with a regulator instead of a website.
This is not medical advice, not a safety assessment and not a recommendation to buy or avoid anything. Nothing here is written or reviewed by a toxicologist, and no product is scored by us.
The usual approach rates hazard — whether a substance can harm anyone at any dose — and then colours it as though it described the jar in your hand. Those are different questions. Water is lethal at six litres. Your own body produces formaldehyde. The IARC category that means “possibly carcinogenic” contains aloe vera extract and pickled vegetables.
A colour that ignores dose will mark safe things dangerous and give false comfort about genuinely risky ones, which is the standing criticism toxicologists make of apps in this category. EFSA’s overexposure findings dodge that, because they are about measured intake against a safe level rather than about the substance in the abstract. That is the only kind of statement a traffic light can honestly carry.
Only a few dozen additives carry an EFSA overexposure verdict at all. Everything else gets a grey badge saying nothing was found — never a green one.
That distinction is the single most important thing on the page. Colouring absence of evidence as safety is the commonest failure in this whole category of tool: it hands out reassurance nobody earned. If we have nothing on an ingredient, the honest thing is to say we have nothing, and let you decide what to do with that.
A yellow badge means something different again: EFSA has published an opinion, but no conclusion about whether people exceed the safe intake is recorded in this data. Assessed but unresolved, rather than assessed and cleared.
Food additives only. Cosmetics, cleaning products and household goods are regulated under entirely separate regimes, and none of that data is in here. A skincare barcode will mostly return nothing.
Coverage of products themselves is patchy too. Open Food Facts is built by volunteers photographing labels, so a missing product means nobody has added it yet, and a present one may still have an ingredient list that is incomplete, out of date or mistyped. Check the packet — this reads a database, not your actual jar.
The badge describes an additive across a whole diet, not the amount in this product. A red badge is not a statement that this item is dangerous, and it cannot tell you how much is in it.
There are no affiliate links here, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. If this page marked one product red and earned a commission on the alternative it suggested, the badge would be advertising with a citation stapled to it — and the rating would be worth nothing, because you would have no way to tell which findings were real and which were sales.
The tool is more useful when it is not selling you anything. What it does instead is show you the source and get out of the way.
No. It means EFSA found that intake of that additive across the whole diet risks exceeding the amount considered safe. It says nothing about how much is in this particular product, and a single item is rarely the reason a population-level intake figure is high.
Because EFSA has published an overexposure verdict for only a few dozen additives. Everything else gets a grey “not in this data” marker. That is deliberately not green: we would be telling you something was fine when what we actually have is nothing.
Not usefully. The additive evaluations here are food-specific, and cosmetics and household products fall under separate regulations with separate data that is not in this tool. A non-food barcode will usually find nothing.
To Open Food Facts, which is where the product data lives. That request goes from your browser straight to them and not through us. We do not store the barcode, the product or the result.