Clean loaf or just clean label?

Knowing that many of us find a litany of E numbers off-putting, some manufacturers are now turning to so-called processing aids. By a quirk of EU law, if an industrial loaf (or other food) manufacturer deems an artificial additive to be a “processing aid”, it does not have to appear on the label, as long as any “residues do not present any health risk and do not have any technological effect on the finished product”. As a consequence, suppliers often market these additives as “clean label” or “label friendly”. Companies may defend the use of processing aids with comments along the lines of “we always comply with the law”, which is nice to know. Another defence is that “they get used up during manufacture”, despite the fact that their use may, quite legally, “result in the unintentional but technically unavoidable presence of residues of the substance or its derivatives in the final product”.