What is maltodextrin?

Maltodextrin is starch, usually from corn, potato or rice, broken down with acids or enzymes into short chains of glucose. It’s a white powder that doesn’t taste sweet, and it turns up in protein powders, seasonings and sauces. It’s one of NOVA’s markers of ultra-processed food.

Maltodextrin gets two opposite reputations. Some people see the chemical-sounding name and assume it’s a synthetic additive. Others see it as harmless filler and skip past it. It’s a carbohydrate made from starch, the same stuff as the starch in a potato, cut into shorter pieces in a factory.

We wouldn’t fear maltodextrin, and we’d still treat it as a flag. It almost never shows up in food you’d make at home, so when it’s on a label, you’re holding something built from parts. Check what else is on the list.

Starch is a long chain of glucose beads. Maltodextrin is the same beads cut into short strings. Your body breaks both down into glucose.

What the FDA says it is

The FDA’s rule for maltodextrin (21 CFR 184.1444) calls it “a nonsweet nutritive saccharide polymer that consists of D-glucose units”, made “by partial hydrolysis of corn starch, potato starch, or rice starch with safe and suitable acids and enzymes”. It’s generally recognized as safe and can be used “with no limitation other than current good manufacturing practice”.

“Nutritive” means it has calories.

Why it’s a marker

NOVA’s authors put maltodextrin on their list of sugars “of no or rare culinary use”, with high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose and invert sugar. Home cooks use flour and corn starch, which are kitchen ingredients. They don’t use maltodextrin, so one mention of it on a label puts the food in group 4.

It isn’t on the 2025 to 2030 US guidelines’ list of added sugar names, since the name doesn’t end in “-ose” or include “sugar” or “syrup”. It still counts as a carbohydrate on the nutrition panel.

Where it shows up

From US labels in Open Food Facts, checked with this site’s label checker on November 14, 2026. You can watch it light up on the example chip label in one tomato, four groups.

What we’d do

• Treat it as a sign that the food was built from parts, and check the rest of the list.
• Paste the label into the label checker. Maltodextrin lights up with what it is.
• For blood sugar questions, glucose.guide covers what spikes it.