Is maltodextrin gluten free?

A powder made by breaking starch down with acid or enzymes until the chains are short enough to dissolve but not short enough to taste properly sweet. It does almost every unglamorous job in processed food: bulking out a sachet of seasoning, stopping a powder clumping, carrying a flavour, thickening a low-fat dressing. That is why it turns up on so many labels, and why it is worth settling once rather than looking up every time.

The name. "Malt" in English food labelling nearly always means barley — malt extract, malt vinegar, malted milk — and barley is a gluten grain. Maltodextrin borrows the same prefix from maltose, the sugar that appears when you break starch apart, and has no connection to malted barley at all. A lot of people have put a packet back on the shelf over four letters.

FDA — packaged food

On ordinary packaged food the ingredient label is trustworthy here. FALCPA requires that when maltodextrin carries protein derived from wheat, the word "wheat" appears on the label. So on an FDA-regulated product, maltodextrin listed with no wheat anywhere on the packet is not made from wheat protein — the absence is meaningful, which is rarer than you would like in label reading.

USDA — meat, poultry, egg

On meat, poultry and egg products the guarantee does not hold. USDA labelling requires only the common or usual name, so wheat-derived maltodextrin can appear as plain "maltodextrin" with no wheat declaration anywhere. A chicken sausage and a tin of soup can carry the identical word and one of them is telling you less. This is the single most useful thing to know about this ingredient, and it is why CiCi asks which agency regulates a product before it reasons about the starch on it.

EU and UK

The EU settled the question in the other direction and wrote it into law. Annex II of Regulation 1169/2011 lists the gluten cereals as allergens "and products thereof, except" — and names wheat based maltodextrins among the exceptions, on the basis that the processing is not likely to increase allergenicity. Wheat-derived maltodextrin therefore need not be declared as an allergen in the EU or UK at all. That is an exemption granted deliberately, not an oversight.

On a packaged food with an FDA label, maltodextrin on its own is fine and needs no further thought. On anything meat, poultry or egg based the word alone does not settle it — if the product also carries a gluten-free claim you are covered by that instead, and if it does not, the manufacturer's customer line is the only real way to find out. Ringing them is less dramatic than it sounds: "is the maltodextrin in this wheat-derived?" is a question their food-safety team answers routinely.

• Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex II — cereals containing gluten, exception for wheat based maltodextrins
• Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (FALCPA) — wheat protein declaration on FDA-regulated food
• 21 CFR 101.91 — FDA gluten-free labelling rule, 20 ppm