Foods With TBHQ
2,019 US grocery products in this catalogue list TBHQ on the label. 1,287 of them carry both a product name and a brand and can be listed by name.
2,019 US products list TBHQ (0.23% of 894,137)
TBHQ is comparatively uncommon in this catalogue: 0.23% of 894,137 US products carry it, so the 2,019 matches below are a narrow slice rather than a staple. Among the 11 additives with a page here, TBHQ has the 10th-largest footprint, behind Aspartame (3,611 products) and ahead of Potassium Bromate (422). 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.
- 0.23% catalogue share
- 1,287 named brand matches
- Totino's largest brand footprint
The short answer
Totino's accounts for the most named products listing TBHQ in this extract (125 of 1,287 listable matches); brand #15 on the same list has 12, and the median of these 15 brand counts is 15.
- 2,019
- US products listing TBHQ
- 0.23%
- of 894,137 catalogue records
- 125
- Totino's leads named-brand matches
- 12
- brand #15 cutoff on this list
Counts are label occurrence in the current Open Food Facts snapshot, not a recall, certification, or medical recommendation.
TBHQ is comparatively uncommon in this catalogue: 0.23% of 894,137 US products carry it, so the 2,019 matches below are a narrow slice rather than a staple. Among the 11 additives with a page here, TBHQ has the 10th-largest footprint, behind Aspartame (3,611 products) and ahead of Potassium Bromate (422). The mean position on the ingredient list is 27.4, deep in the weight-ordered label, which is where trace-quantity additives are declared. 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 TBHQ. The FDA SAFFA record lists it as "Approved (preservative, 21 CFR 172.185)". CSPI's Chemical Cuisine classification for it is "Avoid", which is CSPI's rating, not PlainFoodSafe's.
Brands with the most products listing TBHQ
The footprint is concentrated: Totino's alone accounts for 9.7% of the listable matches, and the fifteen brands below cover 495 of them.
Where these products sit by category
By the label's own primary category, matches cluster hardest in Snacks (510 products, 39.6% of listable matches).
| Primary category (as labelled) | Products |
|---|---|
| Snacks | 510 |
| Plant-based foods and beverages | 260 |
| Meals | 89 |
| Condiments | 33 |
| Frozen foods | 33 |
| Desserts | 21 |
| Cooking helpers | 12 |
| Salted-snacks | 10 |
| Meats and their products | 9 |
| Null | 9 |
What else is on the same labels
Share of TBHQ 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 TBHQ labels | Catalogue baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Caramel Coloring | 17.2% | 5.7% |
| Red 40 | 14.7% | 5.4% |
| Yellow 5 | 12.7% | 4.8% |
| Titanium Dioxide | 12.3% | 2.1% |
| Polysorbate 60 | 11.3% | 1.4% |
Named products listing TBHQ
Thirty of the 1,287 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 TBHQ record. The headline 2,019 is every matching product in the catalogue; the 1,287 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 TBHQ 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.