Most Common Food Additives in US Products
Data vintage: August 2, 2026 · 20 rows · computed over 894,137 products · CC BY 4.0
This dataset ranks the additives appearing in the most US packaged-food products. Citric Acid leads, found in 91,634 of 894,137 catalogued products (10.2%). Counts are distinct products whose parsed ingredient list contains the additive. Salt, sugar and water are excluded as primary ingredients rather than additives.
Provenance chain
- Upstream: Open Food Facts, an openly licensed collaborative product database. Product records and their ingredient lists are theirs, not ours, and remain licensed under ODbL.
- PlainFoodSafe parses those ingredient lists into a normalized ingredient table and a product-to-ingredient junction, then counts distinct products per additive. The counting and the normalization are ours.
- Percentages are computed against the catalogued product total at request time, so the page, the CSV and this dataset always share one denominator.
Columns
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| rank | Position by number of distinct products containing the additive |
| name | Additive name as normalized in the PlainFoodSafe ingredient table |
| product_count | Distinct products whose parsed ingredient list contains the additive |
| share_pct | product_count as a percentage of all catalogued products |
What this dataset does not establish
- This is a frequency count, not a risk ranking. A common additive is not thereby a harmful one, and the order here carries no safety judgement.
- Open Food Facts is contributor-maintained, so coverage varies by category and brand and an ingredient list may be incomplete or contain transcription errors.
- Synonyms may normalize unevenly (for example "vitamin C" and "ascorbic acid"), so a single substance can be split across rows or merged depending on how contributors typed it.
- Counts are products carrying the additive, not quantities consumed. Nothing here speaks to dose or dietary intake.
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