Glycine and its sodium salt (E640): What the Sources Found

Glycine and its sodium salt is the flavour enhancer the food industry lists as E640. In our table it is low risk: it takes 6 of the 33 additive points off a product's score for a child.

In short

Low risk. 6 of the 33 additive points come off a product that carries it.
No child flag. Nothing below is written about children specifically, so the class is the same at every age.
3 citations from FDA, EFSA, each one below.

What Glycine and its sodium salt does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Glycine and its sodium salt takes 6 of the 33 additive 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.

FDA 21 CFR 170.50 (govinfo CFR-2024-title21-vol3-sec170-50)
FDA no longer regards glycine and its salts as generally recognized as safe for use in human food; by 1971-05-08 manufacturers had to reformulate to eliminate added glycine or operate under an authorising food additive regulation supported by toxicity data (GRAS status for animal feed was unaffected).
FDA 21 CFR 172.812 (govinfo CFR-2024-title21-vol3-sec172-812)
The only authorised human-food uses of glycine are as a masking agent for saccharin's bitter aftertaste in beverages and beverage bases (not to exceed 0.2% in the finished beverage) and as a stabiliser in mono- and diglycerides (not to exceed 0.02%).
EFSA Europe PMC search of EFSA Journal for a glycine (E 640) re-evaluation (executed 2026-08-10)
No EFSA re-evaluation opinion for glycine and its sodium salt could be located; claims of a 2013 EFSA glycine opinion appear only on low-quality aggregator sites and are not cited here.

Why this class

A credible adverse or precautionary signal that stops short of every Moderate and High criterion: peer-reviewed adverse findings not yet reflected in regulatory status, an exposure exceedance confined to high-percentile or single-event estimates, or a precautionary regulatory step short of those criteria — a reduced ADI, a data limitation noted without an adverse conclusion, a narrowed or conditioned authorisation, or a child-focused assessment or school-food law that covers the additive as part of a class.

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.