Carbamide (urea) (E927b)

Carbamide (urea) is the additive the food industry lists as E927b. 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.
  • 3 citations from Law, Agency review, EFSA, each one below.

What urea does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. urea 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 Regulation (EU) No 1129/2011 (establishing Annex II Part B to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008); Commission Regulation (EU) No 231/2012, specifications for E 927b CARBAMIDE
    VERIFIED in the primary text: 'E 927b Carbamide' is listed in Annex II Part B among additives other than colours and sweeteners — the Union positive list — and Reg 231/2012 gives it full identity and purity specifications (synonym urea, assay not less than 99.0%). The permitted use is chewing gum with no added sugar at a maximum of 30,000 mg/kg; the Part B listing was quoted directly, while the 30,000 mg/kg level is corroborated by secondary additive databases and by JECFA's 3% figure rather than quoted from the truncated consolidated Part E text.
  • Agency review JECFA evaluations — urea/carbamide (WHO/FAO JECFA database, chemical 2177; 41st meeting, 1993)
    'Use at levels of up to 3% in chewing-gum not of toxicological concern.' This is a positive assessment at the same level the EU permits — the classification rests on an affirmative clean finding, not on an absence of evidence.
  • EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2023.8112 (EFSA 2023 peer review of the pesticide risk assessment for urea) and 10.2903/j.efsa.2011.2071 (EFSA NDA Panel 2011, carbamide chewing gum and plaque acid neutralisation, claim ID 1153)
    Supportive, not load-bearing. The 2023 pesticide peer review notes urea's historical safe use as food additive E 927b; the 2011 NDA opinion assessed a positive health claim for carbamide chewing gum without raising a safety concern. No EFSA re-evaluation of E 927b as a food additive has been published as of 2026-08.

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.

See what is in your own cupboard

Scan a packaged food and Sito names the additives in it, then scores the product out of 100 for your child's age.

Sito app: a cereal scored 30 out of 100 for a child's age Sito app: logging a child's meal from a photo

Other additives in the table