Crumbl took its ingredient lists offline. Here's what was on them
Food Babe documented Red 3 and titanium dioxide in Crumbl's own ingredient lists before Crumbl pulled them from its site. Both are already banned elsewhere for the reason regulators gave when they acted.
Emily Harper
Crumbl pulled its ingredient lists off its website this year. Food Babe was the first to document what was on them before they disappeared, and two of the ingredients she flagged are already banned somewhere else in the world for the exact reason regulators gave when they acted.
Red 3 is still legal in food today, but not for long
FD&C Red No. 3 is the dye behind Crumbl's Pink Sugar Cookie, the Pink Sugar Cookie Cake, and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Cookie, according to Food Babe's documentation of the brand's own posted ingredient statements. On January 15, 2025, the FDA revoked its authorization for use in food, citing the Delaney Clause — a law that requires the agency to ban any color additive shown to cause cancer in animals or humans, full stop, with no risk-benefit weighing allowed. The data behind the ban showed Red 3 causes cancer in male rats through a hormonal mechanism. The FDA's own order notes that mechanism doesn't appear to occur in humans, and the effect wasn't seen in female rats, mice, gerbils, or dogs — the law doesn't ask whether the mechanism translates, only whether the additive causes cancer in animals at all.
Food manufacturers have until January 15, 2027 to reformulate. Until then, Red 3 is still legal to sell, and Crumbl is still selling it.
Titanium dioxide has been banned in the EU since 2022 — Crumbl's Cookie Cake Cookie still has it
The Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Cookie's colored decoration also lists titanium dioxide, alongside Yellow 5, Blue 1, and Red 3, per the same documentation. The EU doesn't allow it in food at all. In May 2021, the European Food Safety Authority concluded that titanium dioxide "can no longer be considered safe when used as a food additive," specifically because its expert panel could not rule out genotoxicity — the possibility that the particles damage DNA after they're eaten — and without ruling that out, EFSA couldn't set a safe daily intake for it at any level. The ban on selling food containing it took full effect across the EU on August 7, 2022.
The US has not followed. Titanium dioxide is still an approved color additive here, and Crumbl uses it in this one item.
The lower-tier additives are less alarming, but they're also less disclosed
Polysorbate 80 and propylene glycol show up further down Crumbl's ingredient statements — mainly as emulsifiers and flavor carriers in the dirty soda cream add-ins and a couple of the pink and birthday-cake items. Neither is banned anywhere, and on their own they're minor. The issue Food Babe raised isn't that these are the scariest thing in a Crumbl box — it's that a chain her reporting says used to publish full ingredient statements no longer does, on any of it.
The lists are gone. We checked tonight — here's what's left
Crumbl told Food Babe the lists were pulled for being proprietary information. We checked crumblcookies.com's own nutrition page directly while writing this: allergen flags ("Contains: milk, wheat, soy...") are still there for every item, store by store, but the full ingredient statement — the actual list of what's in the cookie, additive by additive — is gone from the page's own data. Nutrition numbers (calories, carbs) are still published too. It's just the ingredient list itself that disappeared.
What Crumbl's own numbers still say
Some of what Crumbl does still publish is worth a second look on its own. The Dubai Chocolate Brownie is 1,010 calories in a single serving. The Pink Sugar Cookie Cake is 810. The dirty soda menu is its own story: the "Crazy Cousins" flavor — Red Bull, Mountain Dew, pineapple, strawberry puree, and coconut cream — runs 186 grams of sugar and 840 calories in one 32-ounce cup, north of five times the American Heart Association's recommended daily limit and roughly the sugar in 19 Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnuts, in a single drink.
What to actually check for
If you want to avoid the two ingredients regulators have already acted on, the names to look for on any label are Red 3 (also written FD&C Red No. 3) and titanium dioxide. If you want to go further, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, polysorbate 80, and propylene glycol round out the list Food Babe pulled from Crumbl's own pages. The problem is that for Crumbl specifically, that label doesn't exist on the website anymore — you'd have to already know what to ask for.
That's the gap Crumbl on Tallow is built to close: scan or search a product on Tallow and you get what's actually been reported in it and how it stacks up, instead of having to catch a chain's ingredient page before it comes down.