Foods With MSG
9,430 US grocery products in this catalogue list MSG on the label. 6,590 of them carry both a product name and a brand and can be listed by name.
9,430 US products list MSG (1.1% of 894,137)
MSG sits in the middle of the catalogue's frequency range, carried by 1.1% of the 894,137 US products recorded here. Among the 11 additives with a page here, MSG has the 6th-largest footprint, behind Sucralose (10,913 products) and ahead of Titanium Dioxide (8,542). Counts come from Open Food Facts labels joined in PlainFoodSafe; FDA SAFFA and CSPI status appear only when the registry record exists. This page reports label occurrence and attributed status, not whether anyone should eat the product.
- 1.1% catalogue share
- 6,590 named brand matches
- Doritos largest brand footprint
The short answer
Doritos accounts for the most named products listing MSG in this extract (186 of 6,590 listable matches); brand #15 on the same list has 55, and the median of these 15 brand counts is 83.
- 9,430
- US products listing MSG
- 1.1%
- of 894,137 catalogue records
- 186
- Doritos leads named-brand matches
- 55
- brand #15 cutoff on this list
Counts are label occurrence in the current Open Food Facts snapshot, not a recall, certification, or medical recommendation.
MSG sits in the middle of the catalogue's frequency range, carried by 1.1% of the 894,137 US products recorded here. Among the 11 additives with a page here, MSG has the 6th-largest footprint, behind Sucralose (10,913 products) and ahead of Titanium Dioxide (8,542). The mean position on the ingredient list is 14.3. Ingredient lists run in descending order of weight, so that is mid-label: past the base ingredients, ahead of the smallest-quantity additives. Caramel Coloring leads its label companions at 17.2%, moderately above the 5.7% it holds across the whole catalogue.
No state in our regulatory table records an action naming MSG. The FDA SAFFA record lists it as "GRAS".
Brands with the most products listing MSG
No single brand dominates: the largest, Doritos, holds 2.8% of listable matches, and the fifteen below together cover 1,423, so this is a broad industry-wide ingredient rather than one company's formulation habit.
| # | Brand | Listing MSG |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Doritos | 186 |
| 2 | Cheetos | 147 |
| 3 | Pringles | 134 |
| 4 | Great Value | 112 |
| 5 | Hidden Valley | 104 |
| 6 | Campbell's | 96 |
| 7 | Goya | 91 |
| 8 | Ruffles | 83 |
| 9 | Herr's | 77 |
| 10 | Spartan | 77 |
| 11 | Meijer | 70 |
| 12 | Knorr | 67 |
| 13 | Jimmy Dean | 62 |
| 14 | Maruchan | 62 |
| 15 | Roundy's | 55 |
Where these products sit by category
By the label's own primary category, matches cluster hardest in Snacks (1,588 products, 24.1% of listable matches).
| Primary category (as labelled) | Products |
|---|---|
| Snacks | 1,588 |
| Condiments | 993 |
| Plant-based foods and beverages | 532 |
| Meals | 498 |
| Meats and their products | 370 |
| Canned foods | 263 |
| Frozen foods | 91 |
| Dairies | 61 |
| Seafood | 52 |
| Salted-snacks | 31 |
What else is on the same labels
Share of MSG labels carrying each ingredient, next to that ingredient's share of the whole catalogue. A co-occurrence close to the baseline means the two simply meet by chance.
| Ingredient | On MSG labels | Catalogue baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Caramel Coloring | 17.2% | 5.7% |
| Yellow 6 | 14.2% | 3.4% |
| Yellow 5 | 12.9% | 4.8% |
| Red 40 | 10.0% | 5.4% |
| Sodium Nitrite | 7.9% | 2.4% |
| Polysorbate 60 | 4.4% | 1.4% |
Named products listing MSG
Thirty of the 6,590 listable matches, ordered by how many flagged additives each label carries in total. Every row links to that product's own record.
Methodology
Matches come from the parsed ingredient links in the PlainFoodSafe database: a product counts here when its OpenFoodFacts ingredient list resolves to the MSG record (or to any of the 2 label spellings that parse to the same substance; querying only one of them undercounts). The headline 9,430 is every matching product in the catalogue; the 6,590 listable figure is the subset that also carries a usable product name and brand, which is what the tables above can show by name. Regulatory status is read from the FDA SAFFA extract and the state-action table; the rating word is CSPI's own classification. See the full methodology for how the catalogue is built and dated. The additive status we quote is the FDA's own, so read it at the source: Verify with FDA Substances Added to Food → Source: OpenFoodFacts, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data
Caveats and limitations
OpenFoodFacts is crowdsourced, so coverage varies by category and brand and a label recorded here may be out of date relative to the product on the shelf today, because reformulation is common and this catalogue reflects the snapshot it was built from, not a live audit of packaging. Ingredient parsing normalises label spellings and can miss unusual ones, so treat the counts as a floor rather than a census. Presence on a label says nothing about quantity, and nothing on this page is a statement about whether any product is safe for any particular person to eat; for that, read the MSG source record and the named regulators directly.
Every figure on PlainFoodSafe is rendered directly from OpenFoodFacts and FDA data, no number is typed in by an editor. Every count on this page is computed from the parsed OpenFoodFacts ingredient links and the FDA/state source tables, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.