On average, vegan food contain less additives than non vegan food

As part of our iOS 26 update to Fussy Vegan Pro for iOS, we included a brand new food additive summary feature. Whilst manufacturers are required to list the FSANZ approved food additives that are included in the product on the ingredients label, some products list the additive numbers, some list the additive name and some have combination of numbers and names. As these are often spread out throughout the ingredients list, it can be hard to quickly check what additives are in a product. Our new feature will list the additive numbers present in the product (provided we have the ingredients for the product listed in our database) as a summary just underneath and in the same format as we list allergens. VIP Access subscribers can even tap a button to bring up a list of the additives present in  search results page and you can tap on any of the additives to find out more about what that additive is and what it does.

Because we are now tracking the additives found in products, we were able to look at some numbers regarding how many ingredients, and even more so, how many additives are in vegan products vs non vegan products.

Here are some key points:

We analysed the additives in 18,000 packaged food products available in Australia and New Zealand. These are all the packaged food products in our database where we have the full ingredients documented. We have not cherry picked a set number of vegan vs non vegan products or types of food products. This lists covers everything from bread, breakfast cereals, lollies, soup, soft drinks, pre-packaged meals, tinned foods, sauces, dairy and processed meat products (vegan and non vegan) and more.

• The average packaged food product contains 13 ingredients, 3 of which are food additives.
• When we break this down to vegan vs non vegan, the results were surprising.
• Vegan products on average contain 11 ingredients vs 18 ingredients for non vegan products.
• Vegan product on average contain 2 additives vs 4 additives for non vegan products.
• Out of the 18,000 products, 20 of those products contained 20 or more additives in each product. 18 of these 20 products were non vegan.
• There were 827 products that contained at least 10 additives, and 527 were non vegan products with vegan products only accounting for 300 products.

We see a lot of propaganda about vegan food being unhealthy, having more ingredients and more food additives than non vegan food. We are not qualified to speak to which ingredients or additives are healthy vs non healthy, but we can say that on average, non vegan packaged foods tend to have around 60% more ingredients and twice as many additives compared to vegan packaged foods.