The Prebiotic & Fiber Label Index

What this is. Every branded food and drink sold in the US whose label markets fiber or a prebiotic, with what the panel actually declares: how many grams, from which fiber, against how much sugar. 54,753 products. We publish the data, the method and the traps. Updated with each USDA release.

Built September 22, 2026 from USDA FoodData Central, Branded Foods, release of April 30, 2026 — the full 3.1 GB dataset, not a sample.

The shelf54,753 products, 2.7% of the catalogue

USDA’s branded-food dataset holds about 2 million US label records. Filtering for products that either name one of 14 fiber ingredients or declare at least 2 grams of fiber in a snack, bar, cereal, yogurt or drink leaves 54,753 unique products from 4,936 brand owners — 2.7 percent of the catalogue. Of those, 21,292 name a specific fiber on the label; the rest simply declare the grams.

The median product declares 3 grams of fiber per serving. A quarter sit at 2 grams or below, and only 16.9 percent reach 5 grams — the amount in one can of the drinks currently marketed hardest on fiber. Just 2.3 percent reach 10 grams.

The fibersAmerica’s most-named fiber is mostly a glaze

This is the finding we did not expect, and it took a second pass to get right. The ingredient that appears on the most labels is not chicory root or inulin, the ones the category talks about. It is acacia, on 8,610 products. But split those by the form the label actually names, and the picture inverts.

Form the label names	Products	Median fiber per serving
Gum acacia / acacia gum / acacia (gum arabic)	7,695	1.01 g
Acacia, unspecified	770	1.06 g
Acacia fiber (or prebiotic acacia / acacia senegal)	145	4.99 g

So the honest version of “acacia is everywhere” is this: the gum is everywhere, in 7,695 products that carry a median of one gram of fiber in total, and actual acacia fiber is on 145. Anyone quoting the raw acacia rank without that split is reporting a thickener as a prebiotic.

Fiber named on the label	Products	Median grams per serving
Acacia (all forms)	8,610	1.01
Chicory root	4,012	4.06
Inulin	3,899	3.02
Soluble corn fiber	2,542	3.99
Polydextrose	1,679	3.99
Citrus fiber	924	1.02
Psyllium	841	3.04
Tapioca fiber	664	6.01
Pea fiber	472	3.00
Isomalto-oligosaccharide (IMO)	420	5.02
Agave inulin	323	3.00
Resistant dextrin	188	5.00
Beta-glucan	118	2.00
Cassava root fiber	40	8.88

Chicory root and inulin together — the prebiotic backbone of the category — appear on 7,217 labels. Cassava root fiber, the newest entrant and the one wildwonder switched to in its Apple Yuzu can, is on 40 products so far, at the highest median dose of any fiber here.

One exclusion worth stating, because it would have changed the ranking: plain tapioca dextrin appears 13,169 times, almost always beside calcium stearate in the 2-percent-and-under line, where it is a coating rather than a fiber. Counting it would have quadrupled the tapioca line. We count only “tapioca fiber” and “resistant tapioca dextrin.”

Fiber and sugarMore fiber usually means less sugar

Fiber per serving	Products	Median total sugars	Median added sugars
Under 2 g	6,747	9.0 g	9.98 g
2 to 5 g	35,128	7.18 g	5.99 g
5 to 10 g	7,337	6.01 g	4.03 g
10 g and over	1,139	2.0 g	0.0 g

Across the whole index the correlation is weak and slightly negative (r = −0.06), but the bands are clean: the highest-fiber products carry a median of zero added sugar, against about 10 grams for the lowest-fiber ones.

Naming vs gramsWhat the word “fiber” on the front is worth

455 products put the word “fiber” in the product name. They do carry more than the rest — a median of 5 grams against 3 — but 258 of them, well over half, compute to under 5.6 grams, the level FDA ties to a “high fiber” claim, and 49 come in under 3 grams. Narrow it to the 37 named “high fiber” or “excellent source of fiber” and 12 still land under 5.6.

We are not calling any of those products mislabelled, and neither should anyone citing this. USDA’s text is a product name and an ingredient statement, not the front of the package, and our per-serving figure is recomputed from the per-100-gram value, so it rounds differently from the printed panel. It is a flag for reporting, not a compliance finding.

The shelfSnacks, not sodas

Fiber marketing reads like a beverage story because that is where the advertising is. The shelf says otherwise: snacks are 45 percent of the index (24,733 products), cereal 13.7 percent, bars 12.1 percent, and drinks only 11.9 percent (6,535). Cereal and bars also carry the most fiber per serving, at a median of about 4 grams; drinks sit at 2.93.

Read it rightFour traps in this data

1. The catalogue is stale, and that is the most useful thing about it. Label records run from April 2019 to April 2026, with a median date of May 2022; 62 percent predate 2023. So the index shows what manufacturers submitted, not what is on the shelf today. Our cross-checks prove it: Poppi’s 18 records all compute to 2.16 grams from agave inulin — the pre-2025 recipe, not the current 3-gram can. Halfday’s records all show 8.16 grams from agave inulin, with no trace of the cassava-and-acacia blend we reported this month. Where a brand’s current panel differs, the brand’s panel wins.

2. Absence is not evidence. Two of the five products we checked by hand are simply not in the release: Trader Joe’s Apple Prebiotic Soda (despite 141 other Trader Joe’s records) and Optimum Nutrition’s Protein Shake + Fiber (despite 95 other records from that brand). Never write “there are N such products on the US market” from this file.

3. Some values are impossible, and we gated them. 706 products (1.3 percent) declared more fiber than carbohydrate, or more than 100 grams per 100 grams — nearly always a per-serving figure filed in a per-100-gram field. Those are excluded from every statistic and flagged in the data. Even after gating, the extreme tail is unreliable: the 99th percentile of 13 grams is solid, the maximum of 90 grams is not.

4. Brand names in the source are wrong more often than you would think. Poppi is filed under “Sew Sensational”; OLIPOP appears under “Deco Home Solutions” and “Sahara Beans LLC.” Search this data by product name, not brand owner.

The dataDownload, method, and how to cite it

• Download the index (CSV, 4.1 MB, 21,292 products naming a fiber ingredient)
• Method and limitations (Markdown) — source release, SHA-256, every filter, 11 stated limitations

Source. USDA FoodData Central, Branded Foods, release of April 30, 2026. Free to download and reuse, including commercially, with attribution.

Need a cut we have not published — one brand, one category, one fiber over time? Email editor@guthealthtimes.org and we will run it.

This page is educational and is not medical advice. Fiber needs differ from person to person; our fiber calculator estimates a personal target from your own numbers.