E440 - Pectins
What it is and how it is used
Pectin is a structural carbohydrate from plant cell walls — the substance that holds plant tissue together and softens as fruit ripens. Commercial pectin is not synthesised: it is extracted with hot acidified water from citrus peel and apple pomace, both by-products of the juice industry, then precipitated with alcohol and dried.
Its defining property is that it sets a gel, and the conditions it needs to do so depend on how much of the pectin chain carries methyl groups. High-methoxyl pectin, the traditional jam-making type, needs a lot of sugar and an acid pH to set — which is exactly why traditional jam recipes call for equal weights of fruit and sugar and a squeeze of lemon. Low-methoxyl pectin sets with calcium instead, and is what makes reduced-sugar jams possible at all.
Foods commonly containing it
Jams, marmalades and fruit preserves, fruit fillings and glazes, jelly sweets and fruit gums, drinking yoghurts and fermented milk drinks (where it stops the protein settling out), and reduced-sugar preserves.
Safety summary
Pectins are authorised in Great Britain as E 440 and sit in Group I — permitted at quantum satis, with no numerical maximum. The assimilated specifications regulation names two forms: E 440(i) pectin and E 440(ii) amidated pectin.
The former Scientific Committee for Food allocated an ADI ‘not specified’, and EFSA's 2017 re-evaluation saw no reason to change that. The Panel found no indication of genotoxicity, no adverse effects in a chronic rat study up to 5,000 mg/kg bw/day (the highest dose tested), and no allergenic potential. Pectin is not absorbed intact; it is fermented by gut bacteria, which is to say it behaves as a soluble fibre.