Annatto

Cheddar is not orange. Somebody decided it should be, several centuries ago, and annatto is what they used.

It comes from the seed of Bixa orellana, a tropical shrub, and the US regulation names the plant outright along with the permitted extractants. It colours cheese, butter, smoked fish, custard powder and a great deal of snack seasoning, and it is one of the oldest colouring agents still in industrial use.

The reason it sits next to carmine

The two get confused constantly, and the confusion runs in the direction that matters.

Carmine is made from insects. Annatto is made from a seed. Both are described as natural colours, both make things orange or red, and both appear on the same kinds of products, so a reader scanning for animal ingredients has to be able to tell them apart by name rather than by category.

Annatto is the one that is genuinely plant-derived, which makes it the ordinary answer for anyone avoiding animal ingredients, alongside Beta-carotene in the yellow-orange range. The page for people avoiding animal ingredients covers why “natural colour” on a front label settles nothing on its own.

Why it is also filed under allergies

Annatto has an unusual position among colours: there are documented reports of reactions to it, uncommon but real, which is more than can be said for most.

And it falls in exactly the gap this site keeps finding. It is not one of the nine major food allergens, so it never appears in a Contains statement, never gets bold emphasis, and gets no help from the allergen line that most people are taught to read first. It sits under its own name in the ingredient list and nowhere else, which is the same structural position as Sulfites and Guar gum.

What the name hides

Two things, both minor and both worth knowing.

The extract is not one substance. Bixin is the oil-soluble pigment and norbixin the water-soluble form, and which one a manufacturer uses depends on what they are colouring. Both appear on labels and both are annatto.

And the extractants are named in the regulation rather than on the packet, one of which is Propylene glycol. That is a processing solvent rather than an ingredient of the finished colour, which is why it does not appear in your cheese, and it is a reasonable illustration that the regulation frequently contains detail the label was never designed to carry.

Is there a safety question

Not a general one. Annatto has been assessed repeatedly and used for centuries, and the reason it appears on this site is the pair of questions above: whether it is animal-derived, which it is not, and whether it is a name worth learning if you react to colours, which for a small number of people it is.