How classification works

We read each product's ingredient list from Open Food Facts and look for specific words. We never assume a product is exempt because of what kind of product it is: imported flour, small-mill flour and recipe changes make those rules unreliable. If it's not in the ingredient list, we don't count it.

Each product gets one status:

Unfortified: No folic acid or other added vitamins and minerals in the ingredient list, and no white wheat flour that would need them.
Folic acid free: No folic acid in the ingredient list, and no white wheat flour that would need it. Other vitamins or minerals are added.
Likely fortified: check the pack: Contains wheat flour that isn't wholemeal, but no folic acid is listed. Non-wholemeal wheat flour must have folic acid added from 13 December 2026, and this label may predate that.
Contains folic acid: The ingredient list mentions added folic acid or an added folate form.
Not enough information: Open Food Facts has no ingredient list for this product, or it's too short to classify.

What we look for

Folic acid: folic acid, pteroylmonoglutamic acid, vitamin B9, and the same in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.
Added folate forms: methylfolate, L-methylfolate, calcium L-methylfolate, 5-MTHF. We count these as added folic acid.
Non-wholemeal wheat flour: wheat flour, white flour, plain flour, self-raising flour, strong white flour, brown flour, malted wheat flour, “flour (wheat)”, and flour listed with added iron, niacin and thiamin (only wheat flour has to have those added).
Wholemeal flour: wholemeal, wholewheat and wholegrain wheat flour. We match these first, so “wholemeal wheat flour” never counts as plain wheat flour.
Other added vitamins and minerals: iron, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamins A, B6, B12, D and K, biotin, pantothenic acid, zinc, iodine and added calcium. Any of these makes a product “Folic acid free” rather than “Unfortified”. We don't count vitamins C and E, which are usually there as antioxidants rather than to fortify.
Other wheats: durum, spelt, khorasan, emmer and einkorn flours aren't common wheat, so they're outside the fortification rules.

Things to know

We only look at ingredient lists, not nutrition tables. Folate that occurs naturally in foods like vegetables isn't “added”, so we don't flag it.
Fortified flour is often listed with its additions in brackets, like “wheat flour (calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamin, folic acid)”. We read the brackets, so each product page shows where a match was found.
“Likely fortified” means the product contains non-wholemeal wheat flour but folic acid isn't listed. The label may have been printed before 13 December 2026, so check the pack.
Open Food Facts is edited by volunteers, so lists can be out of date, incomplete or have typos. If the “ingredients” are really a barcode or a nutrition table, we mark the product “Not enough information” rather than guess. Every product page shows the date its data was last updated.

Where to find it

We don't check supermarket websites or stock levels. Shop information comes from Open Food Facts in two ways:

Own-label products: the brand is the supermarket's own, like Tesco Finest, Taste the Difference (Sainsbury's) or Specially Selected (Aldi). These are almost certainly sold there, unless they've since been discontinued.
Spotted there: an Open Food Facts contributor recorded seeing it in that shop. That could have been a while ago.

If you've bought something somewhere we don't list, you can add the shop on its Open Food Facts page.