Fumaric acid (E297): What the Sources Found

Fumaric acid is the acidity regulator the food industry lists as E297. 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 Fumaric acid does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Fumaric 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 call for data (July 2024) — background document for the re-evaluation of fumaric acid (E 297) and succinic acid (E 363)
Both additives entered the re-evaluation programme in 2024; no safety conclusion published as of Aug 2026.
FDA Substances Added to Food inventory — fumaric acid
Permitted US food additive / GRAS use as an acidulant; no restriction tied to children.

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 medium. 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.