Is now the time for natural food colors?

For many years, the vibrant yellow of Kraft Heinz’s iconic macaroni and cheese came from the artificial food colorings yellow no. 5 and yellow no. 6. In 2012, the company started searching for a natural replacement.

It was an enormous technical challenge. To color the cheese powder in each packet, Kraft needed a natural yellow that would stain the macaroni like the synthetics do. But most natural sources of yellow, such as turmeric and annatto, are fat soluble, meaning they tend to stick to the fatty cheese sauce rather than the just-boiled noodles.

“They would have just slid off with the sauce,” says Susan Frecker, a veteran food scientist at the natural-color firm Oterra. “It has to all happen right when the packet hits the product.”

To solve the problem, Kraft turned to the Danish firm Chr. Hansen, which spun off Oterra as an independent business in 2021. Improving staining required forms of natural yellows that were more water soluble. Kraft also had to get the ratios right. Annatto provides a vibrant yellow color, but a formulation with lots of annatto adds an off taste. Mixing in more paprika and turmeric masks that flavor.

Perfecting the formula took years, but eventually a combination of annatto, turmeric, and paprika worked. Kraft quietly rolled out the new formula in late 2015 and still uses the natural colors today.

Kraft’s mac-and-cheese switch came amid a wave of consumer concern about negative health effects from synthetic food colorings, which prompted commitments to ditch the colors by food companies, including General Mills, Kellogg, and Mars. These firms did reformulate some products, but they found that while some consumers were asking for naturally colored products, many more rejected the duller versions. So the synthetically colored foods stayed on grocery store shelves alongside some new naturally colored options.

Now, 10 years later, food companies are once again under pressure to eliminate synthetic food colorings. In January, the US Food and Drug Administration banned the use of the artificial dye red no. 3 in food, starting in 2027. And in April, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime skeptic of synthetic food additives who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), held a press conference alongside FDA leaders announcing several measures encouraging companies to voluntarily remove all synthetic colors from their food by the end of 2026.

Big food companies have been preparing for this moment. California and West Virginia have already enacted their own regulations to limit the use of synthetic colors, especially in food served at schools. And the number of consumers scrutinizing ingredient lists to avoid synthetics is growing.

But replacing all synthetic colors with natural alternatives will be a herculean task, especially at the speed the FDA and HHS have proposed. Synthetic colors cover a wide range of bright hues that are hard to match. They’re also rugged, able to survive high temperatures and pH levels up and down the scale.

Food scientists and industry analysts say the technology for natural colorants has advanced significantly over the past decade. Color houses like Oterra have expanded their palettes of natural pigments, and they’ve developed techniques to make natural colors more stable. But even with those advances, naturally colored food may not always look like the products customers are accustomed to.

“I think there’ll be a middle ground. I’m sure there’ll be improvements to the ways we can protect the color to keep it vibrant,” Frecker says. “But at this point, we’re probably going to need to compromise a little bit.”

Under pressure

Humans have long used juices, plant extracts, and minerals to make their food look more appealing. But synthetic colors weren’t invented until the 1850s, when the English chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally synthesized a purple textile dye from the petrochemical aniline.

Over the decades that followed, scientists developed a wide range of synthetic food colors. At first, these colors were usually made from coal tar, but today the starting material is generally petroleum.

The synthetic food colors worked fabulously. They were vibrant. Reds brighter than roses. Oranges as dazzling as sunsets. They were also tough enough to survive the increasingly industrialized food system’s suite of processing techniques, such as pasteurization and extrusion.

But not all the synthetic colors were safe to eat. On Halloween in 1950, some children in the US fell ill after eating candy with high amounts of orange no. 1. In 1976, the FDA banned red no. 2 in foods after a study showed it could cause cancer in rats, a move that spurred public scrutiny of all red dyes and led Mars to temporarily stop making red M&Ms, even though they didn’t contain red no. 2.

Despite those warning signs, food companies were loath to ditch synthetics. Instead of switching to natural additives, they mostly pushed forward with the synthetic colors that the FDA still considered safe. The pendulum swung away from health concerns, and by 1987, red M&Ms were back.

Subsequent scientific studies haven’t identified many health risks associated with the synthetic colors that are used today. But consumer groups continue to question them, often citing two studies: a 1987 paper that found rats fed high doses of red no. 3 developed liver tumors and a 2007 study that reported an increase in hyperactivity in children after they consumed drinks with synthetic dyes.

When announcing the ban on red no. 3, the FDA noted that humans wouldn’t normally be exposed to the high levels of dye used in the rat study and that it doesn’t pose a serious risk but that a law requires the agency to ban food additives that have any link to cancer. In 2011, the agency reviewed the effect of the consumption of synthetic colors on hyperactivity and decided the connection wasn’t solid enough to warrant a regulatory change.

Other agencies and policymakers believe that synthetic colors may pose a health risk. A 2021 review by the California Environmental Protection Agency argues that while many studies don’t find any adverse health outcomes from consuming synthetic dyes, some have found evidence that the dyes are connected to inattentiveness and hyperactivity. And in 2010, European lawmakers passed a law requiring food companies to warn consumers about a link between synthetic dyes and hyperactivity, despite the European Food Safety Authority’s conclusion that the evidence wasn’t strong.

European food companies subsequently reformulated many products to eliminate synthetic dyes so they could avoid warning labels. The ingredients company Sensient Technologies estimates that about 80% of food colorants in Europe today come from natural sources. As a result, naturally colored versions of cereals such as Froot Loops and Trix available in Europe are less vibrant and feature a narrower range of colors than US versions.

Most recently in the US, some members of the Donald J. Trump administration, and HHS secretary Kennedy in particular, have said they want to reduce the prevalence of synthetic colors in the US food supply. But at Kennedy’s April press conference, he didn’t propose a mechanism to force producers to make that change. “We don’t have an agreement. We have an understanding,” he said.

Indeed, the idea isn’t going over well with the food industry. In a statement, the International Association of Color Manufacturers says that trying to phase out synthetic colors so quickly ignores the difficulty of the shift, which would require monumental changes to company supply chains.

Some industry watchers agree. “There is no way that all food brands will be able to reformulate all their products to alternatives by the end of 2026,” says David Schoneker, founder of the food industry advisory firm Black Diamond Regulatory Consulting. “It may take many years to actually make changes.”

Color correction

The botched attempts to eliminate synthetic colors a decade ago loom over food and color companies, but they say they’re better equipped to get the job done this time. They argue that improved technologies and new sources of natural colors will allow them to better replicate the products consumers know and love.

Each food application presents its own challenge. In a laboratory at Oterra’s US headquarters just outside Milwaukee, application scientist Ashlee Martin arrays several bottles of red sports drinks on a table. Reference bottles colored with red no. 40 sit next to bottles colored with black carrot extract, cooked apple juice, and a type of sweet potato bred by Chr. Hansen to maximize color production. The natural alternatives are difficult to distinguish from the reference.

Martin says it’s sometimes hard to find natural colors that tolerate a drink’s pH level. Anthocyanins—red compounds that can come from carrots, grapes, or other plants—stay red at low pH levels. But in neutral or basic environments, they turn purple or blue and start to fade.

That was one of the obstacles Martin faced while helping McDonald’s remove red no. 40 from its strawberry milkshakes. Dairy products have a neutral pH, so red and pink anthocyanins want to turn purple. But Martin found a way to use β-carotene and an anthocyanin from black carrots to get the perfect color.

Food scientists like Martin have a number of options in their toolboxes, according to Alireza Abbaspourrad, a researcher at Cornell University who studies natural colors. He says encapsulating anthocyanins with a polymer such as maltodextrin or sheathing them with performance-boosting copigments can increase their stability and preserve red color in hot or alkaline environments.

“These methods are a way for us to put an active ingredient next to the natural-color molecule to protect it from degradation while they are on the shelf, while they are in the product,” Abbaspourrad says.

Oterra isn’t the only company trying to take advantage of the momentum for natural colors. Oterra competitor Sensient says McDonald’s is using a blue anthocyanin extracted from butterfly pea flower, which the FDA approved in 2021, to color the fast-food chain’s purple Grimace-themed shake. On a recent conference call with investors, Sensient CEO Paul Manning called the tightening regulations on synthetic colors the biggest opportunity in the company’s history.

Across the Oterra lab, application scientist John Acero carries a rainbow of gelatin-based desserts to his bench. To make the desserts, boiling water is poured on a powder containing gelatin, sugar, and colorant. One of the best sources of natural blue is the protein phycocyanin, which can come from the algae spirulina. But boiling water causes phycocyanin to precipitate, creating inconsistent blotches of blue. While phycocyanin might work well in low-temperature products like beverages, Acero says it isn’t an option for gelatin and other foods prepared at high temperatures.

Instead, Acero and colleagues have created a blue gelatin powder using a heat-stable extract from jagua, a fruit native to Peru. It took 7 years, but the FDA approved Oterra’s jagua extract for food uses in the US in 2023. Acero says the approval opens up new applications where natural blue colors couldn’t be used before.

The jagua extract is also a big deal for extruded snacks and cereals. During extrusion, corn or rice meal is pushed through a tube at high temperature and pressure. When the grains come out the other end, the relief of pressure causes them to puff. But the heat isn’t friendly to red betanins, which are obtained from beets, or to the blue from spirulina.

In an Australian version of Trix made with natural colors, General Mills used chlorophylls to color watermelon-shaped puffs green, carmine to evoke red raspberries, and black carrot to represent blackberries. Blue puffs are nowhere to be found.

Frecker calls extruded cereal “Mount Everest” for scientists working on natural colors. But she says jagua is a promising way to bring back natural blues and greens. The samples on her bench show how far the company has come, even if the appearance of the jagua-colored cereal is a far cry from the practically radioactive hues in a reference bag of synthetically dyed Froot Loops.

“We can get some nice, bright colors . . . But they’re not this,” she says, referencing the Froot Loops. “They’re not the same.”

Elnaz Shabani, an analyst covering food technology for the intelligence firm Lux Research, agrees that the shift away from synthetic colors is a daunting task. After fielding negative feedback about previous naturally colored products, big food companies are proceeding cautiously.

“These companies care a lot about consumer perception,” Shabani says. “They still care about the functionality. They want everything together.”

Better colors

In addition to the performance issues presented by natural colors, growing enough of the specialty fruits and vegetables to replace synthetics will be a major challenge. One possible solution is to ferment these colors instead, using yeast, algae, or fungi.

Ricky Cassini, CEO of the Argentina-based natural-color start-up Michroma, says producing food colors with fermentation is more efficient and easier to scale up than agriculture or other traditional processes.

The natural red dye carmine, for example, is sourced from red bugs that workers must collect from cactus farms by hand. In contrast, boosting fermentation capacity requires only more bioreactors. “We can do it in a very reduced space, using a fraction of the land and water . . . to produce every day of the year,” Cassini says.

Halim Jubran, CEO of the natural-color start-up Phytolon, argues that fermentation will also yield pigments that perform better than existing natural colors. Phytolon uses yeast to produce purple betanin and yellow indicaxanthin, a compound found naturally in prickly pear cactuses. The firm is able to make a wide range of colors by mixing the two together.

Jubran says his company’s products work well because they’re pure color molecules rather than plant extracts, which can contain impurities like sugar or flavor molecules that impede heat and pH stability. Moreover, pure, fermentation-derived colors won’t impart any vegetable flavors. “If you put a lot of beet or black carrot extract in, you will start to smell that,” Jubran says.

Phytolon produces color additives that are identical to the molecules found in beets and prickly pears, but Michroma and the Danish start-up Chromologics are using fermentation to make more-exotic pigments.

Both companies are trying to commercialize a class of red pigments called azaphilones, which are produced by the fungus Talaromyces atroroseus. Some species from the genus Talaromyces make mycotoxins, so they aren’t suitable for food production. But Michroma and Chromologics say the species they’re using are safe.

Chromologics’ vice president of product strategy, Patrick Collopy, says the pigments are more stable than existing natural alternatives, making them useful for dairy goods and other products that undergo pasteurization. “Our product can go into these ultrahigh temperatures and actually survive,” he says. “We’re able to weather that storm.”

These red pigments are similar to ones produced by Monascus purpureus, a type of fungus used to make a fermented rice dish that people have consumed for centuries in East Asia, but the azaphilones from Michroma and Chromologics have no history of human consumption. Going after brand-new pigments treads a risky regulatory path, but Cassini argues that existing natural colors aren’t good enough to replace synthetic colors. “We need to create novel molecules to solve the problem,” he says.

Even for companies such as Phytolon that are trying to commercialize fermentation-derived versions of commonly used molecules, the regulatory process could be lengthy. This means that while fermentation technologies might provide useful colors in the future, they probably won’t help companies that want to meet Kennedy’s phase-out target of the end of 2026, according to Shabani, the food industry analyst with Lux.

As these technologies advance, it’s also not yet clear what consumers want. Schoneker, the food industry consultant with Black Diamond, acknowledges that some consumers want natural colors, but he believes many more aren’t willing to compromise.

Others, like Cassini, say consumer perspectives are evolving. “The consumer is not looking for that super, hyper, megabright color that looks almost toxic,” he says. “Maybe now it makes more sense to have a more pale color.”

The attempted jump to natural colors a decade ago failed partly because consumers couldn’t let go of the colors they grew up with. As natural colors proliferate, people might just get used to a duller bowl of cereal.