California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday.
The California Food Safety Act will ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No. 3 — potentially affecting 12,000 products that use those substances, according to the Environmental Working Group.
The legislation was popularly known as the “Skittles ban” because an earlier version also targeted titanium dioxide, used as a coloring agent in candies including Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids, according to the Environmental Working Group. But the measure, Assembly Bill 418, was amended in September to remove mention of the substance.
Work for a food company dealing with fallout from this, all of our strawberry products have red #3 in it and there’s alot of discussion swirling around this (though none of the stuff I personally work on is affected, so I’m not privy to any specifics). For whatever reason, they’re not going with any alternative red dyes (cost is a probable factor), so we’re just going to have not-pink strawberry stuff. Though I think there was quite a bit of market research done and alot of people just preferred not having any sort of coloring added. So then we have to wrestle with the packaging because how do you convey that this vanilla-looking food is actually strawberry-flavored? It messes a bit with the packaging we already had, but whatever. I imagine food companies all over the place are dealing with this same question.
Just a crazy idea, but just throw a strawberry 🍓 on the package near the flavor name. Boom, solved!
I’m sorry, but “how do you convey a food is strawberry flavored?” is a terrible excuse. Pictures and words like we’ve done for all recorded history. The idea that X taste has to be Y color is an unnecessary human invention. You should be driven more by the content of your food, than how “pretty” it is. Dressing up junk to make it palatable shouldn’t be the end goal.
That’s not how people work.
You could have the most delicious beef Wellington on the planet, but if it looks like monkey brains, it’s going to give people a gag reflex. If you have a good that your brain expects to taste one way and it tastes another way, then it might cause a gag reflex or other aversion. Of your food looks spoiled, people will be adverse to it even if it’s fresh and perfectly fine.
You can’t undo human survival evolution because it’s ‘unnecessary’ with the snap of your fingers.
Except that modern colors are faked. Natural strawberry stuff isn’t red. “Red cookie = strawberry” is not reality. This idea that the whole food has to be the color of its flavor is manufactured. You expect it now because it’s all you’ve ever known.
This has nothing to do with spoiled food and you’re being completely disingenuous.
Raspberries aren’t blue. Neither are coconuts.
Why do you need to dye strawberries when they are already red? Fucking dumb as hell.
When I hear stuff like this is makes me sure that food companies are intentionally trying to give us cancer.
Likely dyeing products that are strawberry flavored. They’re not putting dye onto strawberries.
Yeah. If you make strawberry cupcakes, for example, they’re barely tinged pink without additional color.
Do you really think strawberry-flavored candy has anything at all related to strawberries in it?
Because there aren’t strawberries in it either. At least not whole ones.