Fatty acid esters of ascorbic acid (E304)

Fatty acid esters of ascorbic acid is the antioxidant the food industry lists as E304. 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.
2 citations from EFSA, FDA, each one below.

What Fatty acid esters of ascorbic acid does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Fatty acid esters of ascorbic acid 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.2015.4289 (EFSA Journal 2015;13(11):4289)
Near-complete pre-systemic hydrolysis to ascorbic acid + palmitic/stearic acid; toxicity extrapolated from ascorbic acid; data too limited for an ADI but 'no safety concern for the use of ascorbyl palmitate (E 304(i)) and ascorbyl stearate (E 304(ii)) ... at the reported uses and use levels'.
FDA 21 CFR §182.3149 (ascorbyl palmitate, GRAS)
GRAS in the US as a chemical preservative.

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.