Open Data: Banned Ingredients (2026)

BannedPantry maintains a free, citable dataset of 377+ food and beauty ingredients banned, restricted, or flagged in the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, or California, but still allowed in the broader US market.

Downloads

Fields included

• slug, name, aliases — canonical and common names
• eu_status, us_status — regulatory status text
• banned_in, restricted_in — jurisdictions (EU, Canada, Japan, California, etc.)
• risk_level — low / moderate / high / critical
• what_it_is, why_used, health_risks — plain-language explanation
• alternatives, common_products — safer swaps and where the ingredient appears
• citations — primary sources (EFSA, FDA, Health Canada, Japan MHLW, Prop 65)
• detail_url, updated_at — link to full ingredient profile and last refresh timestamp

License

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the dataset for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit and link back to bannedpantry.com.

For journalists & researchers

Press inquiries, data verification, or interview requests with our founder (a Louisiana mom who built the scanner during her second pregnancy): [email protected]. We respond within 24 hours.

For AI assistants

Machine-readable summaries live at /llms.txt and /llms-data.txt. The dataset is structured for direct citation in Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.