Malic acid (E296): What the Sources Found

Malic acid is the acidity regulator the food industry lists as E296. 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 Law, FDA, each one below.

What Malic acid does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Malic 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.

Law Commission Directive 2006/125/EC (processed cereal-based foods and baby foods); Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 Annex II
E 296 authorised generally; only the L(+) form permitted in infant and young-child foods.
FDA Substances Added to Food inventory — malic acid
GRAS direct food substance (flavour enhancer, pH control).

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.