South Korea to Amend Food Additive Classification System

Recently South Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety announced it will reclassify food additives according to their functional characteristics. The scheme will be officially released for public opinion later.

At present South Korea still implements a rather antiquated system in which food additives are classified as either “natural additives” or “synthetic additives”. There have been frequent occurrences of food additives being misused due to the current classification system and has helped foster a misconception that natural additives are harmless while synthetic implies some inherent toxicity.

The new scheme will classify food additives based on their functions into 31 different functional categories including preservatives, sweetener and antioxidants. It will also be required to indicate the use of each additive in a table format indicating items including molecular formula, INS number, binomial nomenclature, etc.