The animal ingredients that make food non-vegan: what 14,411 scanned labels show

Published October 13, 2026

People open WhatsVegan when they are standing in a shop with a product in their hand and aren't sure. That makes our scan data a useful record of the labels people actually find confusing. We took every ingredient list scanned in the app between June 2025 and October 2026, removed duplicates and non-food products, and counted which animal ingredients came up and how often.

The data says a lot about how products end up non-vegan. Usually it is not meat or an obvious dairy product. It is one ingredient, often a small one, in a list that is otherwise fine.

Which animal ingredients appear most often

Of 14,411 unique food labels, 2,596 (18.0%) contained at least one clearly animal-derived ingredient. This is how often each group appeared. A label can contain more than one group, so the shares add up to more than 100%.

"Only animal ingredient" counts labels where this was the single animal-derived ingredient. 215 more single-ingredient cases were other animal ingredients, such as rennet, keratin, chitosan or royal jelly, or the same ingredients written in other languages.

Most non-vegan products fail on one ingredient

Of the 2,596 non-vegan labels, 1,495 (57.6%) contained exactly one animal ingredient. Typical examples are whey powder in crisps, gelatin in sweets, honey in cereal bars, shellac on coated chocolates and carmine in red sweets.

For the person reading the label this is the hard part. A quick look at the first few ingredients usually isn't enough, because the animal ingredient is often in the middle or near the end of the list, inside brackets, or written as an E-number.

The allergen statement only catches about half

In the EU, UK and US, milk and eggs have to be highlighted as allergens. That makes dairy and egg easy to spot. Gelatin, honey, carmine, shellac, beeswax and animal fats are not allergens, so they get no special treatment on the label.

In our data, 53.0% of non-vegan labels contained milk or egg. The other 47.0% did not, which means the allergen statement would have missed almost half of the non-vegan products. Reading only the bold words is not a reliable shortcut.

Ingredients that can go either way

Some ingredients can be made from plants or animals, and the label almost never says which. These are the ones that came up most often, as a share of all 14,411 labels:

Natural flavourings stand out: more than a third of all labels listed them. In practice most are plant-based, but animal-derived flavourings exist and the law doesn't require the source to be named. Not counting flavourings, 28.1% of labels had at least one ingredient from this list.

Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471) are the most common "depends" additive. They are made from fats, which can be vegetable oils or animal fat. Most manufacturers use palm, rapeseed or sunflower oil today, but the label rarely says so. Our page on E471 explains how to check.

Vitamin D3 is worth a separate mention. It is usually made from lanolin, the grease in sheep's wool, though a plant-based version from lichen exists. If a fortified product lists vitamin D3 without saying it is from lichen, it is most likely animal-derived.

How many products were clearly vegan?

39.5% of the labels contained no animal ingredient and none of the ingredients in the "depends" list above, natural flavourings included. Those can be called vegan from the ingredient list alone. The rest either contained an animal ingredient (18.0%) or needed a second look.

One more thing the ingredient list can't show is processing. Half of the labels (50.0%) contained sugar. In the US, some cane sugar is filtered through bone char, and this never appears on the label. In the EU and UK this practice is uncommon, and beet sugar is never processed this way.

How to check a label quickly

1. Look for a vegan certification mark first. If it's there, the manufacturer has checked every ingredient, including the ambiguous ones.
2. Read the whole list, including what's inside brackets. Don't stop at the allergens in bold.
3. Watch for the animal ingredients in the first table, plus their E-numbers: E120, E901, E904, E913, E966 and E1105 (see the full E-number list).
4. For "depends" ingredients, look for wording like "vegetable" or "from sunflower", or ask the manufacturer.

You can paste any ingredient list into our free vegan ingredient checker to do this automatically, or take a photo of the label with the app.

How we did this

We used ingredient lists scanned in the WhatsVegan app on iPhone and Android between 25 June 2025 and 12 October 2026. Each scan is read and split into ingredients, and each ingredient is classified as vegan, not vegan, or depends on the source.

• We removed duplicates, so a product scanned many times counts once. That left 15,508 unique ingredient lists.
• We removed cosmetics and personal care products (lists with water/aqua, fragrance, preservatives like phenoxyethanol and similar). That left 14,411 food and supplement labels. The median label had 11 ingredients.
• We grouped animal ingredients by type, including names in other languages. Vitamin D3 was counted as "depends", not as animal-derived, because a lichen-based version exists.
• We only used ingredient lists. No personal data, user accounts or photos were part of the analysis.

One limitation: these are products people chose to scan, usually because they weren't sure. They are not a random sample of what is on supermarket shelves, so the share of non-vegan products in a typical shop is likely different. Most scans came from English-language labels, followed by German, Italian, French and Polish.

If you'd like to use these numbers, please link to this page. For questions about the data, write to us at [email protected].

Common questions

Sources

• Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on food information to consumers, Annex II (allergens that must be emphasised): eur-lex.europa.eu
• US Food and Drug Administration, food allergen labelling: fda.gov
• EFSA re-evaluation of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), 2017: efsa.europa.eu
• The Vegan Society, vitamin D: vegansociety.com