Red Dye 40: What It Is, Which Foods Have It, and Is It Banned?

The short answer

Red Dye 40 is a synthetic color the FDA still allows in food. It is FD&C Red No. 40, also declared as Allura Red AC, and it is among the most widely used certified color additives in the United States. It is one of the colors that can put a warm tint in a processed product.

The FDA has not banned it. The FDA has not revoked it. The red dye the FDA recently revoked is a different one, Red 3 (more below). For Red 40, the FDA's current stated goal is to work with industry to eliminate it by the end of 2027. That is a goal, not a rule, so under federal law a product can still carry it today.

On the label it appears as "Red 40", "FD&C Red No. 40", "Allura Red AC", or "Red 40 Lake". All four are the same colorant; the Lake form is bound to a mineral base so it will not bleed into whatever it is coating.

Where it turns up, by category

This is organized the way a pantry actually is, not the way a lab would sort it — so you can scan straight to the shelf you're standing in front of.

Candy and confectionery

The category most people check first, and the one where Red 40 is least likely to be alone. Hard shells, gummies and fruit-flavored candy typically carry Red 40 alongside Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Blue 1 in the same product. Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids all currently carry it — see our candy without Red Dye 40 page for exactly which flavors and what to buy instead.

Drinks

• Sodas, especially red and orange varieties
• Sports and electrolyte drinks
• Powdered drink mixes
• Juice drinks and juice "cocktails" (not 100% juice, which is a different aisle)
• Freezer pops and slushie syrups

Fruit snacks and gummies

Long the most consistent carrier in a lunchbox, including many labeled "made with real fruit" — that claim describes the juice content, not the color. It is also the clearest example of why a brand-level answer is now worthless: Fruit Roll-Ups and Gushers are made by the same company, sit on the same shelf, and give opposite answers today. Both are in the checked list below. See our full dye-free snack list, organized by exactly this category.

Cereal and breakfast

This is the category that changed most in 2026, and it changed in opposite directions depending on who made the box. General Mills says every one of its US cereals — Lucky Charms and Trix named specifically — is now made without certified colors. WK Kellogg has said it will finish the same job by the end of 2026, which means as of this writing Froot Loops is still made the old way. Both are in the checked list below, with each company's own words.

Plain and bran cereals were almost never dyed to begin with — there was no marketing reason to.

Baked goods and frosting

Sprinkles, decorated cookies, and pre-made frostings and icings. This is also where Lake pigments concentrate, because a coating or a shell needs a dye that will not bleed into what it is sitting on.

Dairy and desserts

Flavored yogurts and puddings — mostly the berry and "fruit on the bottom" varieties — plus gelatin desserts and novelty ice cream toppings.

Savory and unexpected foods

The category most dye-free lists skip entirely. Some seasoned chips and crackers, certain sauces and salad dressings, pickles, and some processed meats and seafood carry Red 40. Standard Nacho Cheese Doritos are a common example — the reformulated Simply NKD line drops it, which is one of the few cases where a mainstream snack now has a dye-free sibling on the same shelf. Color in this category is a merchandising tool, not a flavor cue, which is exactly why it's easy to miss.

Children's medicines and supplements

The category that quietly does the most damage to a careful elimination attempt. Pain and fever reducers, allergy syrups, cough medicine and chewable vitamins are commonly colored. A daily gummy vitamin can contribute more regular exposure than a monthly bag of candy, because it is dosed every day rather than eaten occasionally. Dye-free versions of most major children's brands exist — a pharmacist can usually find one faster than reading every shelf label.

Toothpaste and mouthwash

The category almost no "where does Red 40 hide" list includes, and one of the most overlooked. Kids' toothpaste and mouthwash are frequently colored for the same reason candy is — visual appeal — and they are used twice a day, every day, in a small but genuinely swallowed amount. Worth checking alongside the medicine cabinet, not after it.

Bakery and deli counters

Items packaged in-store — a decorated cake, a deli salad, a rotisserie glaze — may carry abbreviated labeling or none at all. When the panel isn't available, treat the color as a question rather than an answer.

Is Red Dye 40 banned? Where it sits in the phase-out

This is the part most articles get backwards, so it's worth being precise.

Red 40 is not subject to a revocation order. The dye the FDA has revoked from this group is Red 3, with a January 15, 2027 compliance deadline for food and beverages and January 18, 2028 for ingested drugs. Our explainer on what the Red 3 revocation means has the details.

Red 40, along with Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2 and Green 3, falls under the separate voluntary phase-out announced by HHS and the FDA on April 22, 2025. The agency asked manufacturers to remove these dyes; it did not require it, and there is no enforceable date behind that request. The April 2025 announcement said the FDA would work with industry to eliminate the six "from the food supply by the end of next year," which meant the end of 2026. The FDA's industry pledge tracker, current as of October 16, 2026, now says the end of 2027.

West Virginia passed a law that goes further. House Bill 2354, signed March 24, 2025, would bar Red 40 and six other dyes as ingredients in school meals from August 1, 2025, and in food for sale in the state from January 1, 2028, according to the governor's announcement. A federal judge preliminarily blocked enforcement on December 23, 2025 in a suit by color manufacturers, finding the law likely unconstitutionally vague. The press report we read does not say how the order applies to school meals or to the 2028 date, and we have not confirmed where the case stands now. We have not checked other states' laws.

Practically: Red 40 will keep appearing on labels for as long as individual manufacturers keep using it. Several large companies have announced removal timelines running through 2026 and 2027 — Doritos and Cheetos already have dye-free lines — and others have announced nothing. Until the box in your hand is reformulated, the ingredient panel is the only thing that tells you the truth.

Is Red Dye 40 bad for you?

Short version: for most children no effect has been shown; for a subset, the evidence suggests dyes can affect behavior, and there is no test for who is in that subset.

The agency's statements and the reviewers' conclusions are below, kept apart from our own read. The disagreement is mostly about children.

• What the FDA's consumer page says. On its page on color additives (content current as of December 14, 2023; read October 21, 2026), the FDA says: "The totality of scientific evidence indicates that most children have no adverse effects when consuming foods containing color additives, but some evidence suggests that certain children may be sensitive to them." The same page says color additives are safe when used in accordance with FDA regulations, and that parents who want to limit them can check the ingredient list and discuss concerns with their family physician.
• What HHS leadership said in 2025. In the April 22, 2025 announcement, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said: "These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children's health and development." That is a statement from agency leadership announcing a phase-out, and it is stronger than the consumer page. In the FDA pages we read, the action on Red 40 is a request to industry, not a revocation or a new safety finding.
• What the three reviews found. The 2007 Southampton trial found that dye-and-preservative mixtures increased hyperactive behavior in children. The FDA's 2011 advisory committee concluded a causal link had not been established for children in general. California's OEHHA concluded in 2021 that dyes can affect some children's behavior. Red 40 was in at least one of the Southampton mixtures and among the seven OEHHA reviewed. Our explainer on food dyes and hyperactivity lines them up.
• Our read. The evidence points to a subset of sensitive children rather than to harm for most, and the best-known trial used mixtures, so it does not isolate Red 40. If you have not noticed a pattern in your child's behavior, nothing here says you need to act. We do not diagnose or test. Some families run a two-to-three-week elimination followed by reintroduction to see whether anything changes for their child; talk to your pediatrician first. The lists on this page are for a family that has decided to cut Red 40.

Why an undated answer is now worse than no answer

The voluntary phase-out has no enforceable deadline, but it does have momentum, and 2026 is when it started reaching shelves. That has a consequence for anyone reading a list like this one: a "yes" or "no" about a named product is only as good as the day it was checked.

Two examples from the list below, both taken from the companies' own statements this summer. General Mills said on August 26, 2026 that all its US cereals are now free of certified colors, naming Lucky Charms and Trix; the same release says its full US retail portfolio, "including fruit snacks and baking products," will not be finished until the end of 2027. WK Kellogg said on August 6, 2026 that production of reformulated Froot Loops "will begin later this year," shipping "before year-end" — future tense, so the Froot Loops on the shelf today is the old recipe.

Neither company said anything about the boxes already in the aisle, and neither would be expected to. A reformulation reaches production before it reaches your cupboard, so for months the same product name can mean two different panels. That is why every entry below carries the date we read it, and why the panel in your hand outranks anything on this page.

The printable

The original SafeMama one-pager is back: about 30 named grocery snacks on a single page, sized for the fridge.

Download the Red Dye 40 free snacks printable (PDF, 47 KB) — it also lives on the checklists and printables page with everything else.

Read it as a shopping starting point rather than a verdict. It predates the 2025-2026 reformulations, its own footer says to double-check labels, and at least one of its lines is broader than what we would write today — it says "Goldfish, all of them", where our own current check is that the original cheddar is clear and several of the colored spin-offs are not. The dated checks below are the current word.

How we checked these

The sections on what Red 40 is, whether it is banned, and what the FDA says about children were checked on October 21, 2026 against the FDA pages linked in them, each of which shows its own "content current as of" date, and, for West Virginia, the governor's announcement and a press report of the court order (December 2025), which we did not check against the docket. The product list is older and keeps its own dates.

Every entry in the list that follows was read on September 9, 2026, from the manufacturer's own current ingredient listing wherever one is published — a brand product page, the company's own SmartLabel entry, or, for the medicine-cabinet items, the FDA's own repository of the label the manufacturer filed. Where the answer turns on a company's stated plan rather than a panel, the company's own release is linked instead, and the date is theirs.

Where a product's answer differs by flavor, size or line, it is marked as varying rather than flattened into one verdict for the range. Nothing here is a summary of somebody else's summary: a cached ingredient answer for one of these products was wrong in this very session, and the brand's own live page said the opposite.

For the one shelf this list does not cover — water enhancers and flavor drops, where the color is the easiest thing to miss — see the dye-free water flavors list.