Is potassium bromate still legal in bread?

Yes, federally, and the reason the answer feels evasive is that the permission is filed somewhere unexpected.

Why looking it up gives the wrong answer

Search the US food additive regulations and you find potassium bromate permitted “in the malting of barley”, for “fermented malt beverages or distilled spirits”. Beer and whiskey. Nothing about bread.

A reasonable person stops there and concludes it is not allowed in baking. It is, through a different door.

Bromated flour is a standard of identity, a legal definition of a food rather than an approval of an additive. That definition permits potassium bromate “in a quantity not exceeding 50 parts to each million parts of the finished bromated flour”, added “only to flours whose baking qualities are improved by such addition”.

So the bread use rests on what a flour is permitted to be, not on an additive approval. Two regulations, one substance, and only one of them answers the question people are asking.

Where else it stands

California. The California Food Safety Act prohibits, from 1 January 2027, manufacturing, selling, delivering, distributing, holding or offering for sale in the state any food for human consumption containing potassium bromate. It names three other substances alongside it.

Most of the world. The UK, the EU, Canada, Brazil, China and others removed it from bread, largely from the 1990s, following animal carcinogenicity findings.

This is one of the cases where the United States is the outlier rather than the stricter party, which runs against the direction the “banned in Europe” shortcut usually points. That asymmetry is the subject of the banned-elsewhere page.

How to tell whether your bread has it

Look for “bromated flour” or “enriched bromated flour” in the ingredient list, not for potassium bromate. The standard of identity is what produces the label term, so the chemical name often does not appear at all.

Bakers who have stopped using it generally say so on the pack, because it is worth saying. Many have.

The argument, briefly

The case for it is that bromate is used up during baking, converting to bromide, so a properly baked loaf retains little or none.

The case against is that this depends on the baking being done right, and a shopper cannot verify that. A safety argument conditional on correct processing is a different sort of argument from one about the substance itself, and that difference is most of why other regulators went the other way.

Potassium bromate has the full account, and Azodicarbonamide is the other dough treatment where the US and EU disagree.