Free Handy Tools

Product Ingredient Checker

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.

Try an example

The number under the barcode. It is sent to Open Food Facts, which is where the ingredient data comes from — that request leaves your browser and goes to them, not to us.

Where these findings come from
  • The barcodesent to Open Food Facts, a volunteer database of label photographs. Nothing is sent to this site.
  • The ingredient listreproduced as published on the label, not edited or interpreted here.
  • The additive tagsthe E-numbers Open Food Facts parsed out of that list, matched against the EFSA evaluations this page carries.
  • The colourthe conclusion recorded for the linked EFSA opinion, and nothing else. Yellow means the opinion is linked but no verdict on intake is recorded. Grey means the additive is not in the data this page carries at all — which is not a finding of safety, and not proof that EFSA never looked at it.

What this can and cannot tell you

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 the additive is not in the data this page carries, and that is genuinely different from green. It is not a finding that EFSA never evaluated it — some additives EFSA has published opinions on are simply missing here — and it is certainly not a clearance. Yellow means EFSA’s opinion is linked but no verdict on intake is recorded. Only a few dozen additives carry an overexposure verdict, red, orange or green, at all.

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lists come from Open Food Facts, which is built by volunteers photographing labels, so they can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong — check the packet.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.

What this does, and what makes it different

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.

Why most ingredient scanners mislead, and how this avoids it

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.

Grey is not green, and the difference matters most

Only a few dozen additives carry an EFSA overexposure verdict at all, and only those are coloured red, orange or green. Most of the others this page knows about get a yellow badge: EFSA has published an opinion, linked from the badge, but no conclusion about whether people exceed the safe intake is recorded in this data. Assessed but unresolved, rather than assessed and cleared.

An additive that is not in the data this page carries gets a grey badge saying so — 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.

Grey is a statement about this page’s data, not about EFSA. Some additives EFSA has re-evaluated are simply missing from it — the lecithins, E322, are one — so a grey badge does not mean nobody has ever looked.

What it does not cover

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.

Questions about the ingredient checker

Does a red badge mean the product is dangerous?

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.

Why are so few additives red, orange or green?

Because only a few dozen additives have an EFSA overexposure verdict recorded in the data this page uses. Most of the others it carries are yellow: the EFSA opinion is linked, but no verdict on intake is recorded. An additive that is not in the data at all gets a grey “not in this data” marker. Neither is green, because we would be telling you something was fine when what we actually have is less than that.

Can I scan skincare or cleaning products?

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.

Where does my barcode go?

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.

Sources

Last reviewed 27 August 2026