Acesulfame K (E950): What the Sources Found

Acesulfame K is the sweetener the food industry lists as E950. In our table it is no risk identified: it takes no points off a product's score for a child.

In short

No risk identified. No regulator finding we score, so a product keeps all 33 additive points.
No child flag. Nothing below is written about children specifically, so the class is the same at every age.
3 citations from EFSA, FDA, each one below.

What Acesulfame K does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Acesulfame K takes no points off a product's score. Scan the pack in Sito and the score you get is the one for your own child's age, with this additive named in the reasons. How we score has the whole method.

What the sources found

Every classification in our table comes from the citations below, and nothing else. They are quoted as the source wrote them.

EFSA Journal 2025;23(4):9317, doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2025.9317 (PMC12041894), published 2025-04-30
Re-evaluation established a new ADI of 15 mg/kg bw/day (NOAEL 1,500 mg/kg bw/day, UF 100), replacing the SCF's 9 mg/kg bw/day; concluded it is unlikely that acesulfame K intake is associated with cancer, glucose/insulin disturbance, cardiovascular risk or organ toxicity, and that neither the sweetener nor its degradation products raise genotoxicity concerns even at low pH and elevated temperature.
EFSA Call for data on genotoxicity data on sweeteners, 2021-06-30 (efsa.europa.eu/en/call/call-data-genotoxicity-data-sweeteners)
E 950 had been listed as needing basic-battery genotoxicity testing (bacterial reverse mutation + in vitro micronucleus) — a gap that the completed 2025 re-evaluation closed.
FDA High-Intensity Sweeteners (fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/high-intensity-sweeteners)
Acesulfame potassium is one of six high-intensity sweeteners approved by FDA as a food additive, with an ADI established at pre-market review.

Why this class

Clean current EFSA and FDA status. These rows exist so that an unfamiliar additive is never treated as a bad one: a missing row costs a product nothing, and a clean row says so with citations.

Our confidence in this row's classification is high. Medium or low does not mean the evidence is weak; it means something about the row is still being pinned down, usually a regulatory status confirmed from one source rather than two.