Argentina Wrote Sea Salt Into Law in 2024

On 14 August 2024 Argentina put sea salt into its food code. Not as a marketing term, and not as a simple origin label — as a compositional standard with a floor underneath it. The file behind it had been open for five years. Almost nobody outside Argentina has noticed.

What happened

Resolución Conjunta 6/2024, signed on 12 August 2024 and published in the Boletín Oficial two days later, added Article 1264 tris to the Código Alimentario Argentino. It was signed jointly by the Secretaría de Calidad en Salud and the Secretaría de Bioeconomía — health and agriculture together, which is how food standards are made there.

The administrative file it came out of was opened in 2019. Five years from proposal to publication, for four paragraphs about salt.

What the article says

It defines Sal Marina Argentina as crystalline product, predominantly sodium chloride, obtained from the evaporation of Argentine seawater. Then it sets two numbers:

• the sum of calcium, magnesium and potassium, expressed as the sum of their chlorides, must exceed 2 per cent of dry residue
• moisture must not exceed 10 per cent

It also caps arsenic at 0.5 mg/kg, copper at 2, lead at 1, cadmium at 0.5 and mercury at 0.1, and requires compliance with three further articles of the code.

Why a floor is the interesting part

Most origin rules describe a place. This one describes what survived the process.

Sea salt is roughly 78 per cent sodium chloride when it comes out of seawater. The rest is magnesium, calcium, potassium, sulfates and the trapped mother liquor between crystals. Industrial refining exists to remove all of that, because the magnesium salts are hygroscopic and make the product cake. Washing removes most of it too.

So a minimum of 2 per cent chlorides on dry residue is not really a mineral rule. It is a processing rule wearing a chemistry costume. A washed, refined salt made from Argentine seawater would fail it. The category is defined by restraint.

It was built in three steps

The 2024 resolution is the last of three, and the sequence tells you what the regulator was doing.

2021 — Resolución Conjunta 32/2021 rewrote Article 1264, the definition of salt itself, to “the purified crystalline product, composed mostly of sodium chloride.”

2023 — Resolución Conjunta 4/2023 created Article 1264 bis, Sal Marina: salt from the evaporation of seawater, any sea, no compositional floor.

2024 — Article 1264 tris adds the two things 1264 bis lacks: Argentine seawater, and the mineral minimum.

Three years, three resolutions, each narrower than the last. That is not a country tidying up definitions. That is a country building a protected category for a specific industry it wants to exist.

Two things it does not say

It does not say “exclusively.” Press coverage of the resolution — including the best Spanish-language piece on it — describes the salt as obtained exclusivamente from Argentine seawater. That word is not in the article. It is a reporter’s compression, and it has been repeated since. We would rather quote the statute.

It does not create a certification. There is no seal, no registry, no auditor. Article 1264 tris is a compositional standard, and compliance runs through the ordinary establishment and product registrations every Argentine food producer already holds. So nobody is “certified” under it, and any producer telling you otherwise is describing something that does not exist. What a producer can show you is a lab analysis against the numbers.

Why this matters outside Argentina

Almost no premium salt carries a compositional standard at all. Fleur de sel de Guérande has a PGI, and its specification sets insoluble matter and moisture but no mineral content. Maldon has no protected designation of any kind. Halen Môn’s PDO does set a magnesium minimum, and is the closest parallel anywhere.

So when a bag says “sea salt,” it is usually telling you about a body of water and nothing else. Argentina now has a category that tells you something about the salt.

Whether anyone outside Argentina ever learns the phrase is a different question. It is two years old, it is in Spanish, and until now it had no English explanation. That seemed worth fixing.