Sugar
Sugar carries a source-backed screening score of 4/5 and appears in 163,376 indexed US food products. CSPI rates it “Cut Back.”
Source-backed answer
Sugar appears in 163,376 catalogued products. CSPI rates it “Cut Back.” No FDA SAFFA status is attached. Those source labels describe the ingredient; they do not establish whether a particular product, dose, allergy, or diet is safe.
- 163,376
- catalogued products
- #2
- usage rank of 247,206
- 16,735
- named brands represented
- 28%
- 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.
High-volume listing for Sugar - usage rank #2
- Usage rank
- #2
- of 247,206 ingredients that appear in at least one catalogued product.
- Typical depth in an ingredient list
- 28%
- Averaged label depth puts Sugar in the upper half of the list (28% of list length, mean slot 7.0). Compound ingredients and OCR noise mean this cannot stand in for quantity.
Ranks use Open Food Facts ingredient rows on this site’s refresh cycle. 247,206 ingredients with ≥1 product appearance enter the ranking. Prevalence and list depth are catalog facts, not toxicology.
Reading this ingredient record
Separate this ingredient from its product neighborhood
This is a mixed product neighborhood: 57961 of 163376 records have some flagged component, while the rest do not. Compare 0% Fat Greek Nonfat Yogurt; 0% Milkfat Fat Free Small Curd Cottage Cheese; 0% Nonfat Greek Yogurt With Fruit to see how surrounding formulations change; do not assign their 0–100 score range to Sugar itself. The ingredient most often sits in the upper half of the list, and Snacks supplies the most useful like-for-like starting point for a label review.
57961 of 163,376 linked records have some flagged component
All 160817 NOVA-classified records cluster most heavily in Group 4, while the first-category labels split across several shelves. That makes the 0–100 score spread more informative than the average alone: investigate the low end, identify the actual flagged row, and compare it with a similar unflagged formulation before drawing a conclusion.
Next check: pair one flagged product with a similar unflagged product from the same shelf category.
What else is usually in the same product as Sugar
Across the 163,376 products on this site that list Sugar, 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 1.9x more often with Sugar than in the catalogue at large.
| Additive | Shared products | Share of Sugar products | Share of all products |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red 40 | 16,981 | 10.4% | 5.4% |
| Caramel Coloring | 15,427 | 9.4% | 5.7% |
| Yellow 5 | 14,612 | 8.9% | 4.8% |
| Blue 1 | 13,590 | 8.3% | 4.2% |
| Carrageenan | 12,563 | 7.7% | 4.5% |
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, 2026-09-01.
Function
Sweetener
How do the sampled products compare?
Each point is one of the 16 sampled products listed below: its overall safety score against how many separately flagged ingredients its label carries. Bubble size is the number of ingredient rows the label actually resolved to.
Safety score vs. flagged-ingredient count for products containing Sugar
Products Containing Sugar
16 busy labels from the 163,376 indexed products that list Sugar:
Peer ingredients with comparable catalog mass (near “Water”)
Top-decile company for Sugar: 163,376 listings averaging 87.7/100. Comparable product-count neighbours: Water · Salt · Citric Acid.
Similar product count
Nearest other ingredients by Open Food Facts product count (floored at ≥50).
Similar mean product score
Score-axis peers only, mean screening score among ingredients with ≥50 scored products, not a second count list.
What to do with this Sugar record
Start from Sugar's 163,376 catalogued appearances and the attached source fields, then open the product rows that match your use case.
- Open the product sample for Sugar and read how the term sits on real packages. Browse linked labels
- Move to a second ingredient page and compare registry fields plus catalog mass side by side. Compare a peer
- Read how PlainFoodSafe joins source records before treating a screening label as a personal food or health conclusion. Open methodology
This page describes published source classifications and product-label coverage. It is not dietary, allergy, or medical advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Sugar carry its own safety label in this catalog? ▼
This is a mixed neighborhood: some linked products carry a separate flag while others do not. Sugar itself carries a CSPI "Cut Back" rating where the source record supplies them. Compare like-for-like products before treating the average screening score as an ingredient verdict.
Which product shelves show up most often with Sugar? ▼
Sugar ranks in the top decile by product count (#2 of 247,206), appearing in 163,376 indexed products led by Snacks. The sample list below is a slice of that footprint, not the full universe.
What does Sugar do in food? ▼
Sugar is recorded as a sweetener in source technical-effect fields.
Regulatory status: FDA SAFFA (Sugar). Safety ratings: CSPI Chemical Cuisine; product presence: Open Food Facts via PlainFoodSafe (September 2026). Figures are computed from those sources, no editor-typed counts. Methodology · State regulations.