According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, no. The FDA considers added MSG "generally recognized as safe," and when researchers gave sensitive people MSG or a placebo in controlled studies, the reactions couldn't be reliably triggered. That's the honest answer, and we're giving it to you as a company that has never put MSG in a single jar.
Which raises the obvious question. If the science is settled, why isn't it in our blends?
Because the reason we leave it out was never about health. It's about what MSG tells you about everything else in the jar.
First, what MSG actually is
Monosodium glutamate is the sodium salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid. Glutamate is what your tongue reads as savory — the fifth taste, the one that makes a slow-simmered tomato sauce taste like it took four hours instead of twenty minutes.
Here's the part that surprises people: glutamate isn't an invention. It's already in tomatoes, Parmesan, mushrooms, anchovies, soy sauce, and cured ham. When you grate aged Parmesan over pasta, you are adding free glutamate to your dinner. The FDA puts it plainly: MSG occurs naturally in many foods, such as tomatoes and cheeses, and the glutamate released when your body digests protein is chemically the same as the glutamate in MSG. Your body can't tell them apart.
The numbers are worth sitting with. The FDA estimates an average adult takes in roughly 13 grams of glutamate a day just from the protein in ordinary food — against about half a gram from added MSG.
What the FDA actually says
An independent scientific review in the 1990s, commissioned by the FDA, concluded that MSG is safe. That report did describe short-term, mild symptoms — headache, flushing, numbness, tingling, drowsiness — in some sensitive people who consumed 3 grams or more of MSG without food. For scale: a typical serving of a food with added MSG contains under half a gram, and the FDA considers eating more than 3 grams at once on an empty stomach unlikely.
The agency has received reports over the years of headache and nausea after MSG-containing meals. It has never been able to confirm that MSG caused them.
And the whole scare has a surprisingly small origin story: a 1968 letter to a medical journal from a doctor describing how he felt after eating at Chinese restaurants. A letter. Not a study. That letter launched fifty years of "No MSG" signs in restaurant windows.
If you're one of the people who is certain MSG doesn't agree with you, we're not here to argue with your own body. Avoid it. You know yourself better than a review paper does. We're just not going to tell you it's poison, because that isn't true and you deserve better than a scary story used to sell you something.
So why isn't it in our jars?
Here's the real answer, and it's a flavor answer, not a health answer.
MSG is the cheapest savory on the shelf. A tiny amount makes almost anything taste like it has more going on than it does. That makes it extraordinarily useful if the rest of your blend is thin — if your taco seasoning is mostly salt, cornstarch, maltodextrin, and a dusting of chili powder, you need something to make that taste like dinner.
We build blends the other direction. Rock Yo' Taco is eleven real ingredients. The OG is three: sea salt, organic garlic, organic black pepper. That's the whole list. When the garlic is actually garlic and there's enough of it, you don't need a shortcut to savory — the toasted garlic, the cumin, the smoked paprika, the celery seed are doing that work themselves.
So MSG in a spice blend isn't a danger sign. It's a thinness sign. It usually means the jar is carrying more filler than flavor, and something had to cover for it. That's the tell we care about, and it's the same reason we don't use anti-caking agents or hide behind "natural flavors."
How to find it on a label (and how brands get around it)
This is the genuinely useful part, and it's why the "No MSG" badge on the front of a package deserves less trust than the ingredient panel on the back.
FDA rules are clear about added MSG: it has to be declared as "monosodium glutamate" in the ingredient list. It cannot be buried inside "spices" or "flavoring." Its cousins — monopotassium glutamate, monoammonium glutamate — have to be named too.
But glutamate also arrives in ingredients that carry it naturally, and those get listed under their own names. The FDA's position is that a product containing an ingredient with naturally occurring free glutamate, such as hydrolyzed vegetable protein, can't claim "No MSG" or "No added MSG" — because the label would be misleading. Enforcement is another matter, which is why reading the panel beats trusting the badge.
| On the label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Monosodium glutamate | Added MSG, declared as required. |
| Monopotassium / monoammonium glutamate | Same family, must also be named. |
| Hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed soy protein | Carries free glutamate of its own. |
| Yeast extract, autolyzed yeast | Glutamate-rich. Often doing the same job. |
| Maltodextrin, cornstarch, silicon dioxide, "natural flavors" | Not glutamate — but a sign of how much of the jar isn't spice. |
One small factual note, since it comes up: MSG does contain sodium, roughly a third as much as table salt by weight. If your doctor has you watching sodium, that's a conversation for your doctor — not for a seasoning blog. What we can tell you is that Zilch. Nada. None. has no salt in it at all, and gets its savory from fourteen organic herbs and spices: onion, garlic, turmeric, paprika, celery seed, coriander, basil, oregano, dill weed, black pepper, parsley, thyme, cayenne, cumin.
Where savory comes from when you don't take the shortcut
If you want depth without reaching for a glutamate powder, you already have the ingredients. Most of them are in your kitchen:
- Tomato paste, browned. Cook a spoonful in the hot pan until it darkens before you add liquid. Free glutamate, no jar required.
- Mushrooms, cooked dry first. Get them past the squeaky stage and into the brown.
- A Parmesan rind in the pot. Soup, beans, tomato sauce. Fish it out at the end.
- Garlic and onion, toasted in fat. Not raw, not scorched. Sweet and nutty.
- Time. Unglamorous and undefeated. Browning is flavor.
Our Rock Yo' Taco chicken tortilla soup is a decent demonstration of this — it tastes like it simmered all afternoon because of browned aromatics and real cumin, not because something in the packet is faking it.
The short version
MSG is not the villain it was made out to be, and we're not going to pretend otherwise to sell you a jar. We leave it out because our blends don't need it — not because we think it would hurt you. If a seasoning requires MSG to taste like food, look at everything else on that label. That's where the actual story is.
If you'd like to see what three real ingredients tastes like, you get 20% off your first order of $25 or more when you join our list — use code WELCOME20. You can sign up here, and read the panel on the back when it arrives. We'd rather you did.