I wanted a per-product count of the seven FD&C dyes still certified for use in US food, and it turns out the Open Food Facts bulk export is enough on its own. Posting the method and the numbers because I could not find this cut published anywhere.<\/p>\n
Source: the Open Food Facts full CSV export, https:\/\/world.openfoodfacts.org\/data<\/a>. I used the 2026-08-31 snapshot, 1.275 GB gzipped, 4,535,553 rows. Filter to The part I did not expect is that the naming is regular. I went in braced for the inulin problem, where a third of the products containing an ingredient never print its common name and you spend the afternoon chasing synonyms. It is not there. Of the 6,259 products matching any Red 3 form, 23 do not use the plain “Red 3” wording, which is 0.4%. Red 40 is 96 of 28,591, or 0.3%. Yellow 5 is the worst at 0.8%, because tartrazine still turns up. A regex on the number form catches essentially all of it, which is not how ingredient text usually behaves.<\/p>\n There is a regulatory reason for that. 21 CFR 101.22(k)(1) requires a colour additive subject to certification to be declared by the name given in the applicable regulation, and it explicitly allows dropping the “FD&C” prefix and the “No.” So “Red 40” is not shorthand, it is the compliant form. Only colours not<\/em> subject to certification may be declared under (k)(2) as “Artificial Color”, “Artificial Color Added” or “Color Added”.<\/p>\n That flips something I had assumed going in. 16,768 products use one of those generic phrases, and 10,571 of them also name a certified dye, so in those the generic phrase is covering something else in the same product. 3,914 use a generic phrase and name no colourant at all, and by (k)(2) whatever those are, they are not one of the seven.<\/p>\n Where the label does go dark is (k)(3), which says colouring added to butter, cheese and ice cream need not be declared at all. Most producers declare anyway: 27.5% of the 12,080 cheese records name a natural colourant, mostly annatto. But the exemption is real and it is invisible from the ingredient list.<\/p>\n On timing, FDA revoked the Red 3 authorization on 2025-01-15 under the Delaney Clause and gave food manufacturers until 2027-01-15 to reformulate, so this snapshot sits four months out from the deadline. The 6,256 products span 1,073 distinct first-brands, so it is not one catalogue duplicated.<\/p>\n Limitations, and the second one is large.<\/p>\n The gap I cannot close from this export is retail availability. Does anyone know a source that would let me weight this by what is actually stocked, rather than by whoever happened to scan it?<\/p>\n Disclosure per rule 1: I write an iOS app called Snack Check that reads these dyes off a barcode, which is why the parser was already sitting there. I am not linking it, and the export above is the only link in this post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n submitted by \/u\/BigBalli <\/a> countries_tags<\/code> containing en:united-states<\/code> and require a non-empty ingredients_text<\/code>, which leaves 444,943 products. Then match the ingredient text against the US number form, the common chemical name and the E number for each dye.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n \ndye<\/th>\n products<\/th>\n share<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n \n Red 40<\/td>\n 28,587<\/td>\n 6.42%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Yellow 5<\/td>\n 25,973<\/td>\n 5.84%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Blue 1<\/td>\n 22,248<\/td>\n 5.00%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Yellow 6<\/td>\n 17,738<\/td>\n 3.99%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Red 3<\/td>\n 6,256<\/td>\n 1.41%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Blue 2<\/td>\n 4,465<\/td>\n 1.00%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Green 3<\/td>\n 171<\/td>\n 0.04%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n any of the seven<\/td>\n 43,571<\/td>\n 9.79%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n
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