The 2024 European Union monitoring report on food additives and flavourings (1st pilot)

Abstract This EFSA report presents the results of the 2024 European Union (EU) pilot monitoring programme on food additives and flavourings, in response to a mandate from the European Commission. This pilot focused on three food additives, green S (E 142), ponceau 4R (E 124) and tartrazine (E 102), and two flavourings, caffeine (FL No 16.016) and pulegone (Annex III of Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008). The aim of the monitoring programme is to evaluate the occurrence and use of these substances, estimate chronic dietary exposure across population groups and compare the outcomes with previous EFSA assessments. Monitoring data were collected from 22 EU Member States and five food business operators, comprising 18,296 analytical results from 8943 food samples and 663 use levels. Dietary exposure was assessed using three refined exposure scenarios: non‐brand‐loyal, brand‐loyal and food‐supplement ‘consumers only’ scenarios. For the three food additives, all exposure estimates were well below their respective acceptable daily intakes (ADIs). For pulegone, exposure estimates were below the tolerable daily intake (TDI). For caffeine, as already reported in previous EFSA assessments, exposure estimates in several dietary surveys exceeded doses of no safety concern, particularly in adults and the elderly, largely driven by the consumption of foods with naturally occurring caffeine such as coffee and tea rather than foods with added caffeine. Caffeine exposure was higher as compared with previous assessments; the current estimates are considered as largely overestimated due to some limitations in the concentration data and the methodology used in the assessment. Overall, different challenges and misreporting were identified when preparing the monitoring report that might have biased, to different extents, the dietary exposure estimations for the substances assessed. Therefore, conclusions derived in the framework of this first pilot are not yet considered to be sufficiently robust for decision‐making, and further actions will be taken to strengthen the collection and analysis of the monitoring data in the next report.