What additives are made from

Every additive here records the kind of material it starts from, taken from the description of its production on its own page. It is the question readers arrive with most often, and it is worth being exact about what the answer does and does not tell you.

A starting material is not a verdict. It describes a route, not a risk and not a quality. A substance synthesised from a petrochemical feedstock may be identical, molecule for molecule, to one extracted from a plant — no regulator assesses the two differently on that ground, and neither does this site. Nor is it a dietary answer: several substances are made by more than one route, and which route a manufacturer used is rarely declared. For that question see the dietary indexes and allergen origin.

• Plants242

  Extracted from a plant, or made by treating something a plant produced. Seaweed and algae are counted here.

• Animal sources33

  Made from an animal or something an animal produced: whey and caseinate from milk, pepsin and trypsin and pancreatin from stomachs and pancreases, bone phosphate from bone, menhaden oil from fish, lysozyme from egg white.

• Insects4

  Four additives here are made by or from insects: the carmine colours extracted from the cochineal scale insect, shellac from the resin the lac insect leaves on trees, and beeswax.

• Fermentation178

  Produced by micro-organisms grown on a feedstock — citric acid from Aspergillus niger, xanthan gum from Xanthomonas campestris.

• Minerals and inorganic salts192

  Mined, or manufactured from mined material: the carbonates, phosphates, sulphates, silicates and metal oxides.

• Petrochemical feedstocks172

  Synthesised from feedstocks that come out of oil or gas refining — the case for most of the azo colours and several preservatives.

• Other and mixed routes160

  Substances with no single starting material, or made by several routes that this site does not distinguish on the page.

1189 additives, 533 of them recorded as synthesised rather than extracted (986 have the distinction recorded). “Synthesised” and “from a plant” are not opposites: a substance can be synthesised from plant material, and many here are.