Is brewer s yeast gluten free?

Only if the pack says so, and here is why

Brewer s yeast is not certain either way from the label alone, so Munchable raises a caution rather than an avoid. Either it is oats, which do not contain gluten but are grown and milled alongside wheat and so need their own supply chain, or it is a word that names a form of food rather than the grain it was made from. Where the pack itself claims gluten free, Munchable reads that claim and clears it.

On a real product, the reason Munchable shows reads: Contains brewer s yeast, which is made from a gluten grain unless the pack says gluten free

What Munchable checks for Coeliac disease

• Wheat and every name for it: semolina, couscous, bulgur, durum, spelt, kamut, einkorn, emmer, farro, seitan
• Barley and rye, including malt, malt extract, malt flavouring and malt vinegar
• Wheat starch, wheat protein and wheat bran, which the taxonomy files away from the grain
• Bread, breadcrumbs, rusk, panko, pasta, noodles, dough, pastry, biscuits, cake, wafers, pretzels and beer
• Oats, oat milk and muesli as a caution, cleared by a gluten-free claim
• The words that name a form rather than a grain: tortilla, soba, brewer’s yeast
• The pack’s own gluten-free claim, attributed to the manufacturer
• The printed "Contains" and "may contain" lines, read independently of the ingredients
• Rice, maize, buckwheat, quinoa, millet, sorghum, teff and polenta left alone, along with the wheat glucose syrups that EU law exempts

The full reasoning, and the evidence behind it, is in the Coeliac disease guide.

Other ingredients Munchable flags for Coeliac disease

• Backoblate
• Barley
• Barley malt vinegar
• Beer
• Biscuit
• Bread
• Breadcrumbs
• Bretzel
• Brioche
• Cake
• Cereals containing gluten
• Corn malt

The catch with reading labels yourself

Knowing that brewer s yeast is a problem is the easy part. Finding it is the hard part: it hides behind wordings that do not look like it, it matters more near the top of the list than the bottom, and a product you have bought for years quietly reformulates. That is the job Munchable does in the aisle, in about a second, from the barcode.