Caustic sulphite caramel (E150b): What the Sources Found

Caustic sulphite caramel is the colour the food industry lists as E150b. 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.
4 citations from EFSA, Law, FDA, each one below.

What Caustic sulphite caramel does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Caustic sulphite caramel 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 10.2903/j.efsa.2011.2004 (Scientific Opinion on the re-evaluation of caramel colours E 150a,b,c,d), as quoted and tabulated in 10.2903/j.efsa.2012.3030 Table 1
Group ADI of 300 mg/kg bw/day for the four caramel colours, with an individual ADI of 100 mg/kg bw/day for E 150c only, due to the immunotoxicity of THI 'found in E 150c only'. E 150b was below the group ADI in every cell of the exceedance table — children mean, children high level, adults mean, adults high level: 'from 22 to 110 mg/kg bw/day for adults respectively at the mean and high level and between 9 to 35 mg/kg bw/day at the mean and 18 to 117 mg/kg bw/day at high level for children'.
EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2012.3030 (EFSA Journal 2012;10(12):3030), Refined exposure assessment for caramel colours (E 150a, c, d)
'Given that the anticipated exposure to caramel colour E 150b was below the group ADI of 300 mg/kg bw/day established by the ANS Panel in 2011, the present statement does not include a refined dietary exposure for caramel colour E 150b.' E 150b was excluded from the refined assessment because it was the one class that did not exceed. The opinion also records that the minor constituents of caramel colours (4-MEI, THI and sulphur dioxide) 'did not give rise to public health concern' at the levels assessed.
Law Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008, consolidated text 02008R1333 — EN — 16.12.2024 — 059.001 (EUR-Lex), Annex II Part B 'List of all additives' and Annex III
E 150b is present in the Union list (Annex II Part B) as one of the four authorised caramel classes.
FDA 21 CFR §73.85 (Caramel, colour additive exempt from certification); 21 CFR §182.1235 (caramel, GRAS, non-colour use)
US law does not distinguish the four EU caramel classes: §73.85 is a single listing whose identity paragraph permits sulfate and sulfite caramelisation aids, so E 150b, E 150c and E 150d all fall inside it. 'Caramel may be safely used for coloring foods generally, in amounts consistent with good manufacturing practice.' A US label reading only 'caramel color' therefore cannot be resolved to a class from the ingredient panel.

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.