Is potassium sorbate safe?

Potassium sorbate stops mould and yeast growing. That is its whole job, and it is why it is in wine, cheese, dried fruit, baked goods and most cosmetics containing water.

It gets flagged constantly, usually with the word “chemical” doing the argumentative work. The actual picture is more specific and more reassuring.

The number, and why it moved twice

An acceptable daily intake is the amount a regulator considers safe to consume every day across a lifetime. For sorbates that figure has been revised twice, and the sequence is the interesting part.

In 1996 the EU’s Scientific Committee for Food set a group ADI of 25 mg per kilogram of body weight per day. In 2015 EFSA re-evaluated it, judged the old figure no longer supportable on the reproductive and developmental data available, and set a temporary ADI of 3 mg/kg. In 2019, after a new extended one-generation reproductive toxicity study, EFSA revised it again to 11 mg/kg.

Quote only the 2015 step and you have a scandal about a safety limit being slashed. Quote only 2019 and you have regulators going soft. Neither is what happened. Better data arrived and the number was corrected, twice, which is the system working rather than failing.

What that means for a jar of yoghurt

The current figure is 11 mg/kg per day. For a person weighing 70 kg that is about 770 mg, every day, for life. The amounts used in food to keep it from spoiling are nowhere near enough to approach that from a normal diet.

The question worth asking instead

Not “is this safe” but “is this a problem for me”. Irritation on skin is possible at higher concentrations, and genuine allergy to it is uncommon relative to how widely it is used. If you are systematically reacting to products, the pattern usually matters more than any single ingredient.

The full picture is on the Potassium sorbate page, and the reason a hazard on its own tells you very little is in hazard versus exposure.