How we decide whether an additive is halal

What the four labels mean

Halal

Permissible. Nothing in the substance's composition or production is restricted under the halal rules we apply.

Haram

Not permissible. The substance is derived from a source the halal rules prohibit.

Doubtful (mushbooh)

Doubtful. The substance may well be permissible, but something — usually its raw material or its production process — is unresolved. Where an origin cannot be established, caution is the classical position.

Unknown

Not enough verified information to classify. We publish this rather than guess.

The standard these rules come from

The four-label taxonomy and the rules applied to additives follow OIC/SMIIC 1:2019 (General Requirements for Halal Food) and OIC/SMIIC 24:2020 (General Requirements for Food Additives and Other Added Chemicals to Halal Food), published by the Standards and Metrology Institute for Islamic Countries, the standards body of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. OIC/SMIIC 24:2020 is the reference written specifically for food additives: it sets out the conditions under which an additive is halal, doubtful, or not halal.

OIC/SMIIC 24:2020

We apply the classification rules these standards set out. We do not reproduce their additive lists, and Halal & Healthy is not certified, audited, accredited or endorsed by SMIIC or by any certification body.

Where the evidence comes from

Whether a substance can be animal-derived is the fact that decides most verdicts. That signal, along with each additive's technological function and its localised names, comes from the Open Food Facts additive taxonomy — an open, publicly auditable dataset. Authorisation status is checked against the EU and UK additive registers: Commission Regulation (EU) No 231/2012 lays down the specifications, including the raw materials an additive may legally be made from, which is precisely where the plant-or-animal ambiguity in an additive such as E471 is documented. Where the open taxonomy is wrong or too coarse for a halal reader we override it by hand and record why — E441 is listed there as vegan but is gelatine, and E626 is listed as flatly non-vegetarian when it is produced from either yeast or fish.

• Open Food Facts additive taxonomy — origin signal and technological function
• UK Food Standards Agency additive register — authorisation status
• Commission Regulation (EU) No 231/2012 — additive specifications and permitted raw materials

How a verdict is decided

Every verdict on this site is produced by one of the following rules, applied to the evidence above. The rule that produced a given verdict is named on that additive's own page.

• E441 gelatine — Haram. Derived from an animal source the rules do not permit.
• E471 mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids — Doubtful. Made from edible oils and fats that may be either vegetable or animal, and the label does not say which.
• E270 lactic acid — Doubtful. Not animal-derived, but its fermentation substrate is not declared. E252 potassium nitrate is doubtful for a different reason: its role in meat curing.
• E100 curcumin — Halal. Extracted from turmeric root, with no animal input.
• E901 beeswax — Halal. An animal product, but from a source the rules permit. If you avoid all animal-derived ingredients that distinction matters to you, so the page states it.
• Ruled permissible with no origin signal either way — the page states the ruling without claiming an origin it cannot evidence.
• An additive we hold no verified classification for — Unknown, rather than a guess dressed up as an answer.

Food-safety regulators are not halal authorities

Each additive page names a food-safety regulator relevant to the page's language — the FDA, the DGCCRF, the SFDA and so on. Those bodies rule on whether a substance is safe to eat and legal to sell. None of them rules on whether it is halal. An additive can be approved by every food-safety regulator in the world and still be haram, and the reverse holds too. Nothing on the safety rows of our pages should be read as a religious ruling.

What this is not

This is an automated classification, not a fatwa. No scholar, mufti, fiqh council or certification body has reviewed this dataset, and Halal & Healthy issues no religious rulings. It is also not a halal certificate: certification covers a specific product, from a specific plant, on a specific line — a claim no database about substances can make. Manufacturing sources genuinely vary between producers and between production runs of the same brand. For anything you need to be certain about, the product's own certification mark and the certifier behind it is the authority, not this site.

Review and corrections

Every additive record carries the date its classification was last reviewed, shown on that additive's own page. Records are revisited when the underlying open data changes and when a reader reports a problem. If you believe a verdict here is wrong, tell us — a claim about food on a halal site that we cannot stand behind should not stay up.

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