Foods With Red Dye 40
22,216 US grocery products in this catalogue list Red Dye 40 on the label. 13,202 of them carry both a product name and a brand and can be listed by name.
22,216 US products list Red Dye 40 (2.5% of 894,137)
Red Dye 40 is one of the catalogue's high-frequency additives: it appears on more than one in every fifty US products recorded here (2.5% of 894,137). Among the 11 additives with a page here, Red Dye 40 has the second-largest footprint, behind High-Fructose Corn Syrup (24,937 products) and ahead of Yellow 5 (19,566). 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.
- 2.5% catalogue share
- 13,202 named brand matches
- Wilton largest brand footprint
The short answer
Wilton accounts for the most named products listing Red Dye 40 in this extract (237 of 13,202 listable matches); brand #15 on the same list has 91, and the median of these 15 brand counts is 141.
- 22,216
- US products listing Red Dye 40
- 2.5%
- of 894,137 catalogue records
- 237
- Wilton leads named-brand matches
- 91
- brand #15 cutoff on this list
Counts are label occurrence in the current Open Food Facts snapshot, not a recall, certification, or medical recommendation.
Red Dye 40 is one of the catalogue's high-frequency additives: it appears on more than one in every fifty US products recorded here (2.5% of 894,137). Among the 11 additives with a page here, Red Dye 40 has the second-largest footprint, behind High-Fructose Corn Syrup (24,937 products) and ahead of Yellow 5 (19,566). The mean position on the ingredient list is 18.1, deep in the weight-ordered label, which is where trace-quantity additives are declared. Its closest companion on a label is Blue 1, which shows up on 57.7% of these labels against 4.2% of the catalogue at large, roughly 14 times its background rate, so the two are being formulated together rather than meeting by coincidence.
3 states have enacted a restriction naming Red Dye 40, while the FDA SAFFA record still lists it as "Approved (certified color)". The statutes and their effective dates are listed below as recorded, not summarised. CSPI's Chemical Cuisine classification for it is "Avoid", which is CSPI's rating, not PlainFoodSafe's.
Documented state actions naming Red Dye 40
| State | Action | Effective | Legislation |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | school_ban | 2027-12-31 | SB 651 (School Food Dye Ban) |
| Federal | voluntary_phaseout | 2026-12-31 | FDA/HHS voluntary phase-out request (Apr 2025) |
| New York | warning_required | Not recorded | S.4156 (Food Dye Warning Act) |
| Virginia | school_ban | Not recorded | HB 2341 |
| Washington | school_ban | Not recorded | HB 1471 |
Brands with the most products listing Red Dye 40
No single brand dominates: the largest, Wilton, holds 1.8% of listable matches, and the fifteen below together cover 2,186, so this is a broad industry-wide ingredient rather than one company's formulation habit.
| # | Brand | Listing Red Dye 40 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wilton | 237 |
| 2 | Great Value | 214 |
| 3 | Kroger | 196 |
| 4 | Galerie | 173 |
| 5 | Meijer | 172 |
| 6 | Ferrara Candy Company | 154 |
| 7 | Doritos | 152 |
| 8 | Brach's | 141 |
| 9 | Market Pantry | 125 |
| 10 | Kellogg's | 119 |
| 11 | Pillsbury | 113 |
| 12 | M&M's | 104 |
| 13 | Ahold | 98 |
| 14 | Trolli | 97 |
| 15 | General Mills | 91 |
Where these products sit by category
By the label's own primary category, matches cluster hardest in Snacks (5,853 products, 44.3% of listable matches).
| Primary category (as labelled) | Products |
|---|---|
| Snacks | 5,853 |
| Beverages | 1,064 |
| Plant-based foods and beverages | 843 |
| Desserts | 647 |
| Baking-decorations | 364 |
| Beverages and beverages preparations | 260 |
| Cooking helpers | 172 |
| Dairies | 149 |
| Condiments | 145 |
| Dietary supplements | 34 |
What else is on the same labels
Share of Red Dye 40 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 Red Dye 40 labels | Catalogue baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Blue 1 | 57.7% | 4.2% |
| Yellow 5 | 48.8% | 4.8% |
| Yellow 6 | 40.1% | 3.4% |
| Titanium Dioxide | 16.5% | 2.1% |
| Red 3 | 14.7% | 1.1% |
Named products listing Red Dye 40
Thirty of the 13,202 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 Red Dye 40 record. The headline 22,216 is every matching product in the catalogue; the 13,202 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 Red Dye 40 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.