Display omitted •A simple, cost effective and green method was developed for determination of carmine.•This is the first report which uses the CPE for extraction of carmine in real samples.•The results demonstrate the method performance to determine the carmine in food samples. In this paper, a simple and cost effective method was developed for extraction and pre-concentration of carmine in food samples by using cloud point extraction (CPE) prior to its spectrophotometric determination. Carmine was extracted from aqueous solution using Triton X-100 as extracting solvent. The effects of main parameters such as solution pH, surfactant and salt concentrations, incubation time and temperature were investigated and optimized. Calibration graph was linear in the range of 0.04–5.0μgmL−1 of carmine in the initial solution with regression coefficient of 0.9995. The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification were 0.012 and 0.04μgmL−1, respectively. Relative standard deviation (RSD) at low concentration level (0.05μgmL−1) of carmine was 4.8% (n=7). Recovery values in different concentration levels were in the range of 93.7–105.8%. The obtained results demonstrate the proposed method can be applied satisfactory to determine the carmine in food samples.