E513 - Sulphuric acid
What it is and how it is used
Sulphuric acid is the strongest acid permitted in food and, by tonnage, the most-produced industrial chemical in the world. The food-grade material is the same substance purified to a specification that limits arsenic, lead and mercury.
It is almost never present in a finished food. Its role is as a processing acid: adjusting pH during the manufacture of other ingredients, hydrolysing starch into glucose syrup, and controlling acidity in brewing water and in the production of gelatine and modified starches. By the time the ingredient reaches a product it has been neutralised into a sulphate salt.
Foods commonly containing it
Rarely declared on a finished product. It appears in the making of glucose and other starch syrups, gelatine, modified starches, and in brewing liquor treatment; also as an acidity regulator in some alcoholic drinks.
Safety summary
Sulphuric acid is authorised in Great Britain as E 513 and sits in Group I, permitted at quantum satis.
EFSA re-evaluated sulphuric acid and its sodium, potassium, calcium and ammonium salts in 2019 and concluded that exposure “does not raise a safety concern at the reported uses and use levels and there is no need for a numerical ADI”. Both JECFA and the former Scientific Committee for Food had previously allocated an ADI ‘not specified’.
The corrosive hazard associated with concentrated sulphuric acid belongs to the handling of the raw chemical, not to the neutralised traces left in food.