A fumigant used to sterilize U.S. spices is treated by the European Union as if no detectable trace of it is allowed in food at all.
The European Union's legal limit for ethylene oxide residue in sesame seeds is 0.05 milligrams per kilogram, set under Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/868, years before anyone found a problem with Indian sesame shipments. That is not a limit designed to permit controlled use. It functions, in effect, as a floor that operates like a ban.
What just happened
In January 2025, EPA issued an interim registration review decision for ethylene oxide (case number 2275, docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0244), the periodic reassessment every pesticide active ingredient undergoes. The agency's own description of the outcome includes a phased use cancellation for specific food commodities, including dried herbs and spices, while leaving in place uses EPA's own materials describe as "critical for food safety": killing Salmonella and E. coli on products that cooking's heat may not reach reliably.
The decision does not publish a specific calendar date for when the spice fumigation uses end; it describes a phased cancellation without a published completion date. It does tighten the rules around current use: worker inhalation exposure limits step down from 1 part per million today to 0.5 ppm within three years, 0.25 ppm within five years, and 0.1 ppm within ten years.
For that occupational exposure limit specifically, EPA set an 8-year reevaluation clock rather than waiting for the standard 15-year registration review cycle. The decision is interim, not final; EPA has not yet published a completed registration review decision.
How we got here
Ethylene oxide has been used for decades in the United States to sterilize dried herbs and spices, commodities that cannot be heat-treated the way other foods are without degrading flavor and color. FDA's own 2013 risk profile found that spice shipments offered for entry into the U.S. carried Salmonella at roughly 6.6 percent prevalence, about twice the rate of other imported FDA-regulated foods; a 2018 FDA update found retail spices generally test lower, which FDA attributed in part to treatment after import.
Ethylene oxide is one of the tools used for that treatment, which is why EPA's registration review keeps it registered for some uses even as the agency moves to retire others. The 2024-2025 reassessment was not EPA's only recent action on this chemical.
In 2024, EPA finalized a separate set of air-emissions rules for commercial sterilization facilities that use the chemical industrially, a different regulatory track aimed at worker and community air exposure rather than food residues; that rule sits outside what this piece covers, but it is part of the same agency-wide tightening around the chemical in the same period. On the food-residue side, the pressure for EU enforcement came from a different direction: a September 2020 discovery that sesame seeds imported into Belgium from India carried ethylene oxide residue above the EU's existing limit, which triggered a continent-wide recall.
Where regulators diverge
The EU's posture is structural rather than case-by-case. Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 sets maximum residue levels for pesticide residues in food, and when no EU use of a substance is authorized, the default MRL is the limit of quantification, the smallest amount a standard lab test can reliably measure.
For ethylene oxide, measured as the sum of the parent chemical and its breakdown product 2-chloroethanol, that default applies across most food categories: 0.05 milligrams per kilogram for sesame seeds, a limit already in force under Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/868 before the 2020 recall exposed how many shipments exceeded it, down to 0.01 mg/kg for baby food. The EU has not issued a declaration naming ethylene oxide banned.
A detection limit set as the legal ceiling means a product that tested positive for ethylene oxide at any level was legally required to come off shelves regardless of the quantity found. That is what happened to sesame-containing products across 24 EU member states and 9 countries outside the EU starting in September 2020.
The U.S. approach treats the same chemical as a tool worth retaining, on a schedule. EPA's registration review weighs the chemical's effectiveness against stored-product pathogens against the health case the agency cited for restricting certain uses, and in January 2025 it came down on the side of restriction for some uses, including spices and dried herbs, while leaving others in place, on a timeline it has not finished publishing.
Neither posture is simply stricter than the other across the board. The EU's residue policy for food applies to a chemical the U.S. still permits for specific uses; the U.S. worker-exposure phase-down, stepped over a decade, is more gradual than anything in the EU's food-residue framework, which does not ratchet down gradually, it sets a floor and holds it there.
What the label actually says
Nothing on a conventional spice jar tells a shopper whether its contents were fumigated with ethylene oxide. There is no federal labeling requirement tied to this specific treatment, and processing method is not a retail label field the way nutrition facts are.
The one label that does carry a guarantee is "USDA Organic." Under the National Organic Program's rules at 7 CFR part 205, synthetic fumigants are among the prohibited substances and methods for anything certified organic, and organic importers are required to verify that a shipment had no contact with a prohibited substance, including a fumigant, since export.
A product labeled USDA Organic cannot legally have been treated with ethylene oxide. A product without that label could have been, and nothing on the package indicates which is true.
Where PurityIQ fits
This is the kind of gap PurityIQ exists to put in front of you before you buy: not a verdict on whether a spice is acceptable to use, but the regulatory record itself, EPA's phase-out timeline and the EU's residue ceiling, both dated and sourced, next to the product you are holding. You see the record. You decide.
Sources
- FDA, Risk Profile: Pathogen and Filth in Spices (2013; updated Jan. 13, 2018) — https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-risk-safety-assessments/questions-answers-improving-safety-spices
- EPA, Ethylene Oxide Interim Registration Review Decision, Case 2275 (Jan. 2025), docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0244 — https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-01/eto-interim-registration-review-decision-case-2275.pdf
- EPA, Regulation of Ethylene Oxide (EtO) under FIFRA — https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/regulation-ethylene-oxide-eto-under-federal-insecticide
- Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 on maximum residue levels of pesticides in food, as amended by Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/868
- European Commission, RASFF Ethylene Oxide Incident, Crisis Coordination Summary (Jan. 2021) — https://food.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-01/rasff_ethylene-oxide-incident_crisis-coord_sum.pdf
- USDA AMS, National Organic Program Policy Memo PM 18-1, "Fumigation of Organic Imports" — https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/PM18_1FumigationofOrganicImports.pdf
- 7 CFR Part 205 (National Organic Program)
- As of: October 9, 2026.