Aromat, Vegeta and What No MSG Actually Means

Aromat and Vegeta are both salt-first seasonings with monosodium glutamate near the top of the panel: Aromat lists iodised salt, then MSG, and Vegeta Original declares salt up to 56 per cent and MSG up to 15 per cent. In the US, the FDA requires added MSG to be named “monosodium glutamate”, and says a food containing ingredients naturally rich in free glutamate — yeast extract and hydrolysed protein, but also tomatoes and cheeses — cannot claim “No MSG” or “No added MSG”. In the EU, MSG is an additive and yeast extract is legally an ordinary ingredient, which is how “no added flavour enhancers” and yeast extract end up on the same pack.

What is in Aromat

Aromat is the Swiss all-purpose seasoning in the yellow shaker, sold under Knorr, a Unilever brand. Knorr’s current UK page gives the panel as: “Iodised salt, flavour enhancer (monosodium glutamate), lactose (MILK), WHEAT starch, yeast extract, onion powder (2.8%), salt, garlic powder, onion extract, turmeric, boletus edulis mushroom extract, spice extracts (CELERY seeds, clove), boletus luteus mushroom extract, bay leaf extract.”

Three things are worth reading off that. Salt is first and appears twice, once iodised and once plain. MSG is second, so there is more of it than of anything except salt. And there is yeast extract as well, fifth on the list. Aromat is not hiding its glutamate behind anything. It declares both routes to it, by name, on one panel.

The same page gives 58.1 g of salt per 100 g. That is a declared figure on the maker’s own page, not our calculation, but it is worth knowing what kind of figure it is. Under UK and EU rules the “salt” line is total sodium multiplied by 2.5, from every source, including the sodium in the MSG. It is a salt equivalent, not a weighing of the salt that went in. This is also the UK panel; other markets may differ, and the allergen line on the UK pack — milk, wheat, celery, with a may-contain for rye, barley, oat, egg, soy and mustard — is a reminder that an all-purpose seasoning is rarely just salt and herbs.

What is in Vegeta

Vegeta is made by Podravka in Croatia. The international Vegeta site declares Vegeta Original as: “table salt to 56%, 15.5% dried vegetables (carrots, parsnips, onions, celery, parsley leaf), flavor enhancers (monosodium glutamate to 15%, disodium inosinate), sugar, spices, corn starch, color (riboflavin).”

That is an unusually generous panel. Most seasoning makers give you order and nothing else. Podravka gives you ceilings: up to 56 per cent salt, up to 15 per cent MSG, and 15.5 per cent vegetables. Read that carefully: “to 56%” is a maximum, not an analysis. Even so, it means the vegetables that give the product its name are a little over a seventh of the jar, and the MSG is very nearly as much.

Podravka’s US site then shows what happens when MSG is taken out. Vegeta No MSG lists: “Salt, dehydrated vegetables (carrot, parsnip, onion, celery, potato, parsley leaves), sugar, cornstarch, spices, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, riboflavin (color).” The glutamate has gone and a second nucleotide, disodium guanylate, has arrived next to the inosinate. Those are not glutamates, so the “no MSG” statement is literally accurate. They are also in the blend for a reason: flavour chemists pair guanylate and inosinate with glutamate because together they read as more savoury than either alone, and a jar of carrot, onion and celery brings some free glutamate of its own.

What glutamate is, chemically

Glutamic acid is one of the ordinary amino acids that proteins are built from. Locked inside an intact protein it does very little for flavour. Free glutamate, released when the protein is broken down, is what tastes savoury.

MSG is the sodium salt of that amino acid. The FDA’s own Q&A describes it as “the sodium salt of the common amino acid glutamic acid”, made by fermenting starch, sugar beet, sugar cane or molasses. Dissolved in food, it separates into sodium and glutamate. The FDA also states that the glutamate released when proteins are digested is “chemically the same as the glutamate in MSG.”

That is the part most people have backwards. They assume MSG is one substance and the savouriness of tomato, parmesan or yeast extract is another. Chemically, the savoury molecule is the same ion. What differs is how it got there: added as a purified salt, or freed from protein in the ingredient itself.

Yeast extract and hydrolysed protein are the industrial versions of freeing it. Yeast extract is yeast whose own enzymes have broken down its proteins. Hydrolysed protein is soy, wheat, maize or milk protein broken down with acid or enzymes. Both come out rich in free amino acids, glutamate among them. That is why they turn up in stocks, snacks and reduced-sodium seasoning systems; the lower-sodium survey covers that last category.

What the FDA actually requires

The rules sit in two places in the Code of Federal Regulations, and the FDA’s MSG Q&A summarises how the agency applies them.

• 21 CFR 101.22(h)(5): “Any monosodium glutamate used as an ingredient in food shall be declared by its common or usual name ‘monosodium glutamate.’” Not “flavour enhancer”, not an E-number.
• 21 CFR 101.22(h)(7): protein hydrolysates used for flavour cannot be declared simply as “flavor”, “natural flavor” or “flavoring”, because they work as flavour enhancers too.
• 21 CFR 102.22: a protein hydrolysate’s name must identify the source. “Hydrolyzed soy protein” and “autolyzed yeast extract” are acceptable. “Hydrolyzed vegetable protein” and “hydrolyzed protein” are named in the regulation as not acceptable.
• The Q&A: free glutamate occurs naturally in “hydrolyzed vegetable protein, autolyzed yeast, hydrolyzed yeast, yeast extract, soy extracts, and protein isolate, as well as in tomatoes and cheeses.” Foods with ingredients naturally containing free glutamate “cannot claim ‘No MSG’ or ‘No added MSG’ on their packaging.” Tomatoes and cheeses are in the same sentence as yeast extract, not a separate list. MSG “also cannot be listed as ‘spices and flavoring.’” Other glutamate salts, such as monopotassium glutamate, must also be named.

The Q&A also records that the FDA considers added MSG “generally recognized as safe”. We report that as a regulatory status. This article takes no position on MSG and health in either direction, and nothing here should be read as one.

Why “no added MSG” can sit next to yeast extract

Because the answer depends on which rulebook printed the pack.

In the EU, glutamic acid and its salts are food additives, E 620 to E 625, with MSG as E 621, declared by function and name or number. Yeast extract is not an additive at all. The German consumer centres’ site Lebensmittelklarheit puts it flatly: “Hefeextrakt zählt rechtlich als normale Zutat” — legally, yeast extract counts as a normal ingredient. So a European pack can say “no added flavour enhancers” and list yeast extract a few lines down, and the claim is literally about additives. Lebensmittelklarheit’s view is that this sort of “clean label” advertising ought to be regulated. For now it is a gap, not a breach.

In the US, the FDA’s stated position closes that gap for the ingredients it names. A US panel with yeast extract, autolysed yeast or hydrolysed soy protein on it — or, on the Q&A’s wording, tomatoes or cheese — should not carry “No MSG” or “No added MSG” on the package. If you see that pairing in an American shop, the likeliest explanations are an imported pack labelled for another market, a claim made on a website or menu rather than the package, or a label out of step with FDA guidance.

Vegeta Natur Universal is where the US wording bites. Its US page lists sea salt, then dehydrated vegetables including tomato, then sugar, lovage, black pepper, turmeric, garlic and dill. It says the product has “No preservatives, artificial flavor enhancers or MSG” and no added flavour enhancers. It also says, openly, that it contains naturally occurring free glutamate. Read plainly, the FDA Q&A puts tomatoes in the same list as yeast extract and says foods with those ingredients cannot claim “No MSG”. On that wording, a US “No MSG” claim beside tomato runs against the FDA’s stated position. Two qualifications keep this a report rather than a verdict. The Q&A is an explanatory page, not a regulation. And what we read was the product’s web page; the Q&A’s sentence is about packaging, and we have not seen the US pack. The free-glutamate disclosure next to the claim remains the most informative line on the page.

How to read a savoury seasoning panel

Find the salt first. In all four products above it is the first ingredient, and in the two with figures it is around half the jar or more, depending on how you count. The same holds for most of the category, as the seasoning salt and blends around the world pieces show.

Then find the savoury engine. It will be one of three things: “monosodium glutamate” by name; a protein ingredient that brings free glutamate, such as yeast extract or hydrolysed soy protein; or the nucleotides, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate, often doing the job alongside vegetables. A “no MSG” claim tells you which of those three is absent. It does not tell you the product is less savoury, and it was not designed to.

Aromat and Vegeta Original are, in that sense, the most straightforward products on the shelf. They use MSG and say so in the second or third position. That is a deliberate design choice and a defensible one. It is not an accident and it is not a shortcoming. The salt glossary has the rest of the vocabulary.

A caveat on our own sourcing: every panel here was read from the makers’ current web pages in September 2026, not from packs in hand, and formulas differ between markets, as the US and international Vegeta pages show. The Vegeta pages carry a nutrition table per 1 g that did not render as text for us, so the only Vegeta salt figure we give is the declared “to 56%”. The EU position is taken from a German consumer-centre explainer rather than from the text of the additives regulation itself.