14. July 2025
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German Food Additives Museum Hamburg

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

German Food Additives Museum

3.50 EUR
German Food Additives Museum
3.9

Rating

 3.9/5

Flyctory.com Pros

  • Likely a unique place
  • Very thoughtful designed museum
  • Inspiring and very informative

Flyctory.com Cons

  • Comparably small place
  • Difficult access

Preservatives, artificial flavors, abherents and more – there are countless potential food additives in our everyday nutrition. You might feel (like me) that you do not have a sufficient level of knowledge about them and how they impact the way they eat. What about going to a museum and learn? Hamburg, Germany, hosts the Deutsches Zusatzstoffmuseum – the German Food Additives Museum. I felt that this must be a quite unique place – and just had to visit it.

 

Food Additives Museum – Location & Admission

The location of the German Food Additives Museum is right inside the central market. If you walk or use public transport, you can use a gate North of the museum, right next to the Nagelsweg bus stop (lines 3, 34, 640, 641 – there is a Shell gas station next to it). If you come by car or arrive on the weekend (when the central market is not operating), you can use the East vehicle access gate stating you want to visit the museum. There are quite a lot of parking lots, so that this should be convenient. I took a car sharing car to access the museum.

The museum is opening on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00 to 17:00 hrs. The Thursday times are 14:00 to 20:00 hrs. The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Adult admission is 3.60 Euro.

 

Food Additives Museum – The Visit

The Food Additives Museum is located in an office building. The major part of the museum is located in a comparably long room, but the museum also uses additional space for the exhibition. The large room especially hosts the three key exhibits (in my point of view): The unusual supermarket shelf shows you all the different additives which are allowed in the European market. The Supermarket full of Information shows you fruit and veggies and kept fresh or how you could easily create a perfume which smells like salami. You also learn a lot about the rules how additives have to (or don’t have to) be declared, according to European law.

My favorite, however, is the cashier of additives: Like in a children’s grocery toy store, you can grab different items (represented by small blocks and a bar code and scan them at the cashier. Instead of a receipt to pay, you receive a list of which food additives you just would have purchased with that shopping cart.

In one of the smaller rooms, there is a very interesting exhibition, how nutrition is changing. The museum illustrates how food is more and more becoming a functional additive and part of our lifestyle. As the whole museum, the exhibition space is rather compact, but it is really well presented. Outside these rooms, in the walkway, there is a nice timeline of how nutrition changed over time. There are also some minor exhibits and a documentation movie you can watch.

 

Food Additives Museum – My View

A museum about food additives? Can that be attractive? That’s already about what the critics said when this place has been founded in 2008 – and the museum is still active. Thus, this is best proof: yes, it is! The key success factor is of course the creativity of the organizers, who display this topic in a very transparent and interactive way. Even with kids, you can think about a visit to the central market. Unfortunately, the access to the museum is a bit of tricky – but it is worth the effort.

 

Flyctory.com on Eating & Drinking

Flyctory.com is not a culinary blog. Nevertheless, here are all posts dealing with Eating and Drinking:

 

German Museums

Here are all my postings about museums and exhibitions related to or located in Germany:

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