Carriers and carry-over
A reader who checks an ingredients list against a permitted list will sooner or later find an additive in a food where the list does not permit it, and conclude that something is wrong. Usually nothing is. Two provisions explain most of it, and neither is visible from a permitted list read on its own.
Carry-over
An additive may lawfully be present in a food because it was permitted in one of that food's ingredients and came along with it. A sauce made with a preserved concentrate contains the preservative permitted in the concentrate, whether or not the sauce itself may be preserved. Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 sets this out, with conditions. Where the additive arrives through an additive, enzyme or flavouring, it must be permitted in that preparation, must have reached the food through it, and must have no technological function in the finished food. If it does have one, Article 18(3) treats it as an additive of that food, and the conditions of use for that food apply.
This is why a permitted list does not predict a label. It is also why an additive's absence from a food category on this site is not a prediction that you will never see it there.
Carry-over is restricted for foods for infants and young children, where the regulation allows it only as its own provisions state.
Additives inside other additives
The second route is a substance authorised for use not in food but inside something else that goes into food. A colour is rarely sold as a dry powder to be dosed by the gram: it arrives dissolved, diluted or coated, and whatever dissolves or coats it is a carrier, an additive in its own right with its own authorisation. The same applies to additives in enzymes, in flavourings and in nutrient preparations like the vitamin mixes added to cereals.
The European Union lists these separately in Annex III to the additives regulation. 204 additives on this site hold at least one such authorisation, and each shows them on its own page, apart from its permissions in food — because an authorisation to be a carrier is not a permission to be an ingredient.
| Part | Covers | Additives |
|---|---|---|
| Part 4 | Food additives including carriers in food flavourings | 165 |
| Part 2 | Food additives other than carriers in food additives | 164 |
| Part 5, Section A | Food additives added in nutrients except in nutrients intended to be used in foodstuffs listed in Part E, point 01.10, of Annex II and foodstuffs for infants and young children listed in Part E, point 13.1, of Annex II | 157 |
| Part 3 | Food additives including carriers in food enzymes | 148 |
| Part 1 | Carriers in food additives | 97 |
| Part 5, Section B | Food additives added in nutrients intended to be used in foodstuffs listed in Part E, point 01.10, of Annex II and foodstuffs for infants and young children listed in Part E, point 13.1, of Annex II | 25 |
Only the European Union expresses its rules this way among the jurisdictions this site holds, so the table has one column. That is a difference in drafting: the others address carriers and processing aids in their own instruments, which this site does not yet import.
What this means for reading a label
An additive on a label that a permitted list does not cover is more likely to have arrived by one of these routes than to be unlawful. It also means a carrier need not appear on the label at all: it is a component of an ingredient, not an ingredient of the food, and the ingredients list follows the food.
Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008, Article 18 and Annex III. Great Britain assimilated the same provisions. See also the glossary, the label lookup and the method.