Artificial Colors
Artificial Colors appears in 3,243 indexed US food products. No FDA SAFFA status or CSPI rating is attached in this snapshot, so this page reports prevalence rather than a safety verdict.
What the data can answer
Artificial Colors appears in 3,243 catalogued products, but this snapshot has no FDA SAFFA status or CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating attached to it. This page therefore cannot answer whether the ingredient is safe from those sources. It can show how often it occurs, where it tends to sit on labels, and which kinds of products contain it.
- 3,243
- catalogued products
- #291
- usage rank of 248,027
- 695
- named brands represented
- 68%
- average depth down ingredient lists
Catalog prevalence comes from Open Food Facts ingredient lists. FDA SAFFA and CSPI Chemical Cuisine labels are shown only when the source record contains them.
How to use this page
Audit the co-occurring flags first
81.8% of the linked products contain at least one separately flagged ingredient, making co-occurrence the dominant follow-up question. That figure does not identify Artificial Colors as the trigger. Open records such as 1 Wow!, Lollipop Bouquet; 1/4 Sheet White Cake With Colored Icing; 10” Chocolate Cake Filled with Chocolate Mousse and inspect which ingredient row carries the caution marker. The 44.6/100 product average is therefore a triage signal for this surrounding formulation set, not an ingredient verdict. Its 68% average label depth helps locate the term when checking the package.
Processing is unusually concentrated here: Group 4 accounts for 3243 of 3243 NOVA-tagged records. That describes the surrounding products, not the substance. For a useful comparison, hold category and processing level constant, then inspect which named component changes alongside the caution flag; otherwise the product mix will confound the ingredient question.
Next check: open the lowest-scoring linked formulation and locate the exact caution-marked component.
Where Artificial Colors sits among catalogued ingredients
- Usage rank
- #291
- of 248,027 ingredients that appear in at least one catalogued product, listed in more products than 99.9% of them.
- Typical depth in an ingredient list
- 68%
- Of the way down the captured list, averaged across the 3,245 products listing it (mean slot 13.9). Artificial Colors usually falls in the lower half of the list; this position does not measure its amount because source formatting, compound ingredients and labeling exceptions vary.
Derived by this site from the ingredient lists of every catalogued product (Open Food Facts), recomputed on each data refresh. 248,027 ingredients have at least one appearance and are ranked here. Usage and list position describe prevalence, not safety.
What else is usually in the same product as Artificial Colors
Across the 3,243 products on this site that list Artificial Colors, these flagged additives appear alongside it most often. The comparison column is how often each one appears across every product with a parsed ingredient list, so the two figures are measured over the same set. Red 40 shows up about 10.2x more often with Artificial Colors than in the catalogue at large.
| Additive | Shared products | Share of Artificial Colors products | Share of all products |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red 40 | 1,792 | 55.3% | 5.4% |
| Yellow 5 | 1,698 | 52.4% | 4.8% |
| Blue 1 | 1,615 | 49.8% | 4.2% |
| Yellow 6 | 1,147 | 35.4% | 3.4% |
| Titanium Dioxide | 829 | 25.6% | 2.1% |
Co-occurrence describes what manufacturers formulate together. It is not a claim that these additives interact, and it carries no regulatory meaning. Counted over products with parsed ingredient lists; Open Food Facts, 2026-08-02.
Products Containing Artificial Colors
A sample of 16 of the 3,243 indexed products containing Artificial Colors, with each product's overall safety score.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Artificial Colors safe to eat? ▼
This snapshot has no FDA SAFFA status or CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating attached to Artificial Colors, so PlainFoodSafe does not present a source-backed safety verdict for it. The page reports catalog prevalence and label position instead.
What products contain Artificial Colors? ▼
Artificial Colors is found in 3,243 products in our database, spanning various food categories and brands.
What does Artificial Colors do in food? ▼
The current source record does not specify a technical effect for Artificial Colors. Its product footprint is shown here without guessing why manufacturers use it.
Citation notes
Regulatory status from FDA SAFFA; safety ratings from CSPI Chemical Cuisine; product presence from Open Food Facts. See our methodology. Retrieved and formatted by PlainFoodSafe.Every figure on PlainFoodSafe is rendered directly from OpenFoodFacts and FDA data, no number is typed in by an editor. Ingredient figures are computed directly from OpenFoodFacts, FDA SAFFA, and CSPI Chemical Cuisine data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.
