Caramel colour

Caramel colour is probably the most widely used colouring in the world. It is in cola, soy sauce, gravy browning, brown bread, whisky, vinegar, pet food and a great deal else, and on a label it usually appears as exactly two words.

The regulation behind those two words is unusually specific, and it is worth reading because of what is on the list.

The seven starting materials

The regulation defines caramel as the dark material resulting from “carefully controlled heat treatment” of food-grade carbohydrates, and names them:

Dextrose. Invert sugar. Lactose. Malt syrup. Molasses. Starch hydrolysates and fractions thereof. Sucrose.

Two of those seven are worth stopping on. Lactose is milk sugar. Malt syrup comes from barley, which is a gluten grain.

In practice the industry runs overwhelmingly on corn-derived and cane-derived material, because it is cheapest at the scale cola requires. But the permitted list is the permitted list, and the phrase “caramel colour” on a packet does not tell you which of the seven was used.

What catches it, and what does not

On food, the allergen statute catches milk. Milk is a major allergen and its source has to be identified where it is present, so a lactose-derived caramel does not pass through a US ingredient list silently. That is a rule rather than a tendency.

Barley is the harder case. Barley is not one of the nine US major allergens, so the same declaration does not apply to it, and a gluten-free claim on the front of the pack is the sentence that carries a measured threshold behind it. That is the habit the page for people avoiding gluten keeps insisting on, and it is the same reasoning that applies to Barley malt extract.

The ingredient list, on its own, resolves neither.

The alkalis, and why some caramels differ

The regulation also names what may be used to assist caramelisation: acids including citric, phosphoric and sulfuric; alkalis including sodium and potassium hydroxide; and salts including ammonium carbonate, phosphate, sulfate and sulfite.

That last group is the reason caramel is not one substance. Caramel made with ammonium compounds is chemically different material from caramel made with heat and acid alone, which is why several distinct caramels exist under one common name and one E number family.

If sulfite avoidance is your reason for reading labels, the sulfite entry in that list is the relevant one, and Sulfites covers the declaration rules that apply.

Why it says “colour added” sometimes

Colours split into two groups in US law: those requiring batch certification, which are the FD&C dyes with numbers, and those exempt from it.

Caramel is exempt. The regulation says so directly, and the labelling rule then allows colour additives not subject to certification to be declared as “Artificial Color”, “Artificial Color Added” or “Color Added”, unless another regulation requires the name.

A certified dye like Tartrazine gets no such option and has to be named. Neither does Carmine, which is exempt from certification but is separately required to be declared by name, for reasons the page on it explains.

So “colour added” on a label has told you something real: what is in there comes from the exempt list rather than the certified one.

While you are in that regulation, one more line is worth knowing. Colouring added to butter, cheese and ice cream need not be declared in the ingredient list at all, unless another rule requires it. Voluntary declaration is recommended and not required. That is the sort of gap a careful reader would never guess at from the label itself, and it is why the guide to reading a label spends as much time on what is absent as on what is printed.