The EU and Great Britain
Food additives permitted in one and not the other — and what each gap actually means.
392 additives are permitted in both. 6 are permitted in the EU with no permission in Great Britain, none of them explicitly prohibited there. 2 are permitted in Great Britain with no permission in the EU, of which 1 is explicitly prohibited or removed there.
A missing permission is rarely a ban. Usually no one has applied, the substance is named or grouped differently, or it falls under a different law. Only the first two groups below — prohibited, and removed — record a regulator’s decision against a substance, and even those are decisions about legal status, not findings this site draws about safety.
Permitted in the EU, no permission in Great Britain
Not on Great Britain’s list 6
Great Britain permits food additives only where it lists them, and these are not listed. That is not a finding against the substance: usually no one has applied for authorisation there. It does mean they may not be used as food additives in Great Britain today.
| Additive | Function | In European Union |
|---|---|---|
| Buffered vinegar E267 | — | 78 provisions |
| Carbomer | — | 2 provisions |
| Glucosylated steviol glycosides E960d | Sweetener | 34 provisions |
| Glycolipids E246 | — | 3 provisions |
| Oat lecithin E322a | — | 1 provision |
| Trimagnesium dicitrate E345(i) | Acidity regulator | 1 provision |
Permitted in Great Britain, no permission in the EU
Removed from the EU’s list 1
The EU once permitted these and has removed them. The date and the instrument are on each additive’s page.
| Additive | Function | In Great Britain | In European Union |
|---|---|---|---|
| Titanium dioxide E171 | Colour | 46 provisions | Removed with effect from 7 February 2022. Instrument |
Not on the EU’s list 1
The EU permits food additives only where it lists them, and these are not listed. That is not a finding against the substance: usually no one has applied for authorisation there. It does mean they may not be used as food additives in the EU today.
| Additive | Function | In Great Britain |
|---|---|---|
| Stearyl tartrate E483 | — | 4 provisions |
What this page is not
It is not a list of unsafe additives, and a regulator permitting something is not this site’s endorsement of it. Regulators reach different decisions on the same evidence, on different applications, and at different times. Each additive’s page shows every jurisdiction’s status with its citation, and where an assessing body has published a reading of the evidence, that reading, attributed.
Counts are of this site’s additive pages, which follow the regulators’ own listings: a group entry in one jurisdiction can correspond to several pages in another. Status as retrieved from each source; see Sources for dates.