Additives offer many benefits to foods that can be grouped into three major categories:

• Maintaining or improving freshness and safety
• Improving or maintaining nutritional value
• Improving taste, texture and appearance

Additives often serve as preservatives that maintain and improve food freshness and safety. They may help slow the damaging effects that air, bacteria, fungi, mold or yeast can have on food. Antioxidants protect foods from chemical changes caused by oxygen. For example, they help prevent fats and oils from turning rancid in baked goods and prevent fruits from turning brown when they are cut and exposed to air. Meanwhile, antimicrobials inhibit the growth of mold, bacteria and yeast.

Additives are also used to improve or maintain a food’s nutritional value, which helps to reduce malnutrition. Vitamins, minerals and fiber are added to many foods to replace nutrients lost during processing, or may be added to a food simply to boost a person’s intake of certain nutrients. Products that have these added substances are described as enriched or fortified.

Many foods lose nutrients during processing. Enriched foods have vitamins and minerals added back to the food following processing. Examples include adding B vitamins and iron to bread, flour and rice. Fortified foods have nutrients that were not part of the original food, but that were added before processing. For example, iodine may be added to salt, vitamin A and vitamin D to milk, calcium to fruit juices, folic acid to grains and fiber to breakfast cereals.  

Using additives to increase the nutritional value of food has helped to dramatically reduce diseases attributed to nutritional deficiencies, including goiter, rickets, scurvy and pellagra. Each food has a food label and ingredients list that reveal which nutrients have been added.

Finally, additives can help improve taste, texture and appearance of foods. Spices (which may be either natural or artificial) and sweeteners are used to enhance the flavors of many foods. Emulsifiers ensure that a product maintains a consistent texture and keep it from separating. Stabilizers and thickeners lend smooth, uniform texture to a product. Anti-caking agents prevent moisture from causing  products (e.g., salt) to clump together.