The article references an entry published in the International Journal of Toxicology in 2007 which says castoreum is generally regarded as a safe additive by the US Food and Drug Administration, meaning some manufacturers don’t even include castoreum on the list of ingredients for some foods and instead refer to it as “natural flavouring”.

However, according to Michael Gristwood, the executive director of the SA Association of the Flavour and Fragrance Industry, castoreum is likely no longer used to create vanilla flavouring today.

“I think what you’ve picked up is fake news and it’s not news — it’s actually old,” says Gristwood. “As far as I know castoreum used to be used in the 1900s, but today it is used in such small quantities worldwide and most of that is in perfumery where it’s among the some 5,000 individual raw materials used to create perfume compounds.”

The reason for this, says Gristwood, is that castoreum is a very expensive product. You cannot use live animals to obtain it so you have to use the castor sac of dead beavers that have been dried and aged to harvest castoreum.