Vegetable carbon (E153): What the Sources Found

Vegetable carbon is the colour the food industry lists as E153. 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 EFSA, each one below.

What Vegetable carbon does to a score

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

EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2012.2592
Toxicological database on vegetable carbon is sparse; no ADI could be derived; data gaps identified on impurities and particle characterisation.
EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2026.9855
2026 opinion: still no ADI; benzo[a]pyrene and PAH4 margins of exposure all above 10,000 (no concern), but E153 contains a fraction of small particles including nanoparticles and the submitted characterisation was inadequate - the 2012 assessment should be complemented with nanoscale considerations.
EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2026.9855
Toddlers showed the highest exposure estimates across surveys: mean 2.5-29.5 mg/kg bw/day, 95th percentile 11.7-64.3 mg/kg bw/day.

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.