11 Oct 2016 Brand new hue: the quest to create a blue M&M
In response to growing consumer pressure, Mars announced in February that over the next five years it would replace artificial colours from all its processed human foods with pigments found in natural substances. Here’s the story behind this incredibly challenging task…..
THE TEAM OF COLOUR scientists hovered in their white coats and hairnets, staring down at a clear plastic box full of strangely coloured M&Ms. “They look like pebbles, ugly little pebbles,” said Rebecca Robbins, the colour-chemistry manager for Mars Chocolate.
She propped open the lid to show off a muted array of gray, tan, mauve, pale purple and sickly pink chocolate nuggets. Each attenuated shade was the disappointing outcome of an early attempt by Mars to replace a bright, artificial dye with natural pigments extracted from algae, roots, seeds and other parts of plants.
Not a single piece of candy in this tackle box of failure looked edible — let alone tempting. Noticeably absent was any M&M that even vaguely resembled blue, the most coveted, and hardest to find, of colours.
Blue is a rarity among plants and animals. When it does occur in nature, it often isn’t truly blue, but rather a trick of diffraction, or the scattering of light, which is the case for bird feathers, sky, ice, water and iridescent butterfly wings. A blueberry is actually more red than blue when you mash it.
“Unfortunately, you can’t just grind up a peacock feather,” said Robbins, a petite woman with a PhD in organic chemistry and the empathic, wide-set blue eyes of a small-town bartender, with what sounded like genuine regret.
The Mars research kitchen, located at the North American headquarters of Mars Chocolate in Hackettstown, NJ, adjoins a huge manufacturing facility that makes half the country’s M&M supply. This lab is where scientists are now cautiously tinkering with the chemistry of some of America’s most celebrated candies.
Mars has joined a growing list of global food manufacturers removing artificial dyes from some or all of their products. The companies include Nestlé USA, General Mills, Kraft, Frito-Lay, Campbell’s, Kellogg’s and Mondelez International.
The orange glow of Kraft’s revamped macaroni and cheese now comes from paprika, turmeric and annatto, a colouring extracted from tree seeds. General Mills experimented with 69 different natural dyes before it released a naturally coloured Trix and six other reconfigured cereals in January. (The company was unable to find a workable blue or green, so those colours have been left out for now.)
In 2013, the FDA approved Mars’s petition to use the microscopic algae spirulina to make the first natural blue dye approved for use in the US. As a result, any food manufacturer in the country can legally use spirulina as a colourant.
Mars spent years researching spirulina’s safety; in order to overhaul 1,700 or so recipes and update its global manufacturing capabilities, the company desperately needs a substitute for synthetic Blue No 1, as does the rest of the industry.
But right now, there isn’t nearly enough spirulina dye to go around — and in any case, sometimes it doesn’t yield just the right blue, or the colour degrades and comes out blotchy, or it tastes odd. So researchers are still looking everywhere for other natural blue pigments.
Among the contenders being tested in laboratories are a berry found in Central and South America, the huito, traditionally used to make dark blue, semi-permanent ceremonial tattoos and as a bug repellent; a blue gardenia flower; red cabbage; aged red wine; a bacteria used to make Swiss cheese; the Japanese kusagi berry; butterfly-pea flowers; and pigments derived from soil bacteria, tree-root fungi, sea sponges and mushrooms.
With funding from PepsiCo, another business expanding its use of natural colours, a University of Illinois grad student in pharmacognosy (the study of medicinal substances found in nature), who has spent several years searching for new blues, recently found a previously unknown blue pigment in algae growing in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.
Many colours have well-established natural-dye alternatives: orange from beta-carotene, for example, or yellow from turmeric, a mainstay in curry.
Robbins has spent seven years studying the molecular structures of these dyes, and here’s what she has learned: Natural compounds are unpredictable. The molecules hold on to remnants of the places where they grew — the minerals in the water, say, or the weather during a growing season — and sometimes those earthy, atmospheric residues look strange or taste and smell funky.
Artificial colours are simple, stable and nonreactive; Robbins calls them “happy campers.” Yellow No 5 looks the same whether it’s in an acidic product (a Skittle, for instance) or a more basic one (an M&M), while acidic conditions can change a natural pigment from pink to dark blue.
Over the last century, the processed-food industry largely succeeded in replacing fickle nature with synthetic, shelf-stable colours and flavours and preservatives concocted in laboratories. Now that work has to be undone.
As Neil Willcocks, vice president of global R&D for the Wrigley division of Mars, told me, “This is the most complex technical undertaking that any of us have ever seen in the history of the company.”
Scientists estimate that more than half the human brain is involved in processing what we see. Only about 1 percent or so is dedicated to taste. Within the first few months of life, babies begin to distinguish among colours, showing a preference for more saturated ones, especially blues and reds. Vision overwhelms the other senses.
If researchers want you to really taste something, feel its texture against your tongue and smell its subtle notes, they will make you eat it in the dark or under lights that mask colours. Humans are colour-seeking animals, and food companies learned to manipulate that trait early.
In the early 1800s, just as chemistry emerged as a real science from the murky realm of alchemy, food sellers increasingly began to add things to their products, usually to hide discolouration or spoilage.
Copper made pallid pickles green again; children ate candies turned red with lead; old milk was watered down, dyed yellow and thickened with flour and other dubious powders.
Sometimes these colourants and heavy metals killed people directly, but more often — in milk, for example — they simply concealed the presence of contaminants or bacteria that caused illness and death.
In 1906, Congress passed the Food and Drugs Act, which banned poisonous colours. Most of the approved dyes were derived from aromatic hydrocarbons found in the thick black liquid left over from processing coal for fuel. A young British chemist stumbled on mauve, the first coal-tar dye, while trying to distill artificial quinine in 1856.
Six years later, a New York Times article hailing the role played by the new dyes in textile production noted how fortuitous the discovery was for coal manufacturers. Before mauve and other so-called coal-tar dyes became the basic ingredients in this new synthetic-colour industry, coal companies were repeatedly prosecuted for polluting waterways with what The Times referred to as “singularly repulsive refuse.”
These coal-tar colours revolutionised fashion, medicine and food, becoming essential components in cereals, snacks and candy. In 1941, Mars made the first M&Ms, which were included in American soldiers’ rations, by coating heat-resistant, transportable chocolates with coal-tar colours and stamping them with a lowercase “M”.
The potential dark side of these garish colours began to emerge on Halloween in 1950. Dozens of trick-or-treating children, in a couple of cities, became ill after eating candy tinted with high levels of Orange No 1, then one of the most widely used coal-tar additives found in soft drinks, candy, baked goods and processed meats like hot dogs.
Government officials collected candy samples and sent them to Washington, where volunteers who ate them became sick with diarrhea and abdominal pain. The episode caused an outcry among parents and politicians, prompting tests of all artificial colourants.
Some of the coal-tar dyes — different colours were created by mixing the hydrocarbons with other chemical compounds — were found to be relatively safe, but nearly every rat and dog given Orange No 1 showed signs of distress, ranging from weight loss to death. Scientists deemed the dye an acute toxin.
Red No 32 fared even worse; in one experiment, all 48 rats fed Red No 32 died.
After years of haggling between government and industry, a Supreme Court ruling in 1958 resulted in a final ban for Orange No 1 and Red No 32. Two years later, federal legislation led to the prohibition of numerous other dyes and required more rigorous testing of all food colours, eventually leaving us with the seven colours still in use today: Blue No 1, Blue No 2, Green No 3, Yellow No 5, Yellow No 6, Red No 3 and Red No 40.
But fears were renewed in 1973 when a pediatric allergist from San Francisco named Benjamin F Feingold presented a paper at a medical conference suggesting that the consumption of artificial colours caused hyperactivity in children. Though he had little but anecdotal evidence to support his theory, Feingold wrote two best-selling books that advised parents to remove artificial colours and flavours from the diets of hyperactive children.
Despite the popularity of what was called the Feingold Diet, the production of FDA-certified artificial colourants in the United States surged to more than 17 million pounds of powder in 2015 from 1.6 million pounds in 1955. A study released earlier this year found that 43 percent of all food products marketed to children, and 95 percent of fruit-flavoured snacks, contain artificial dyes.
A meta-analysis of 23 studies undertaken in the decade after Feingold first put forward his advice found the link between diet and hyperactivity too small to be statistically significant. But then in 2004 and 2007, two landmark scientific articles, one published in The Lancet, revealed that consuming some artificial colours had a small but noteworthy effect on hyperactivity in more than 300 British children.
The studies prompted the EU in 2010 to begin requiring food labels to clearly note the presence of several artificial dyes along with the warning that they “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”.
To avoid having to include that alarming label, many food manufacturers began phasing out synthetic colours in the European market. A year later, an FDA advisory panel voted that no such label was necessary in the US. (The panel also noted that more research was needed.)
Label or no label, American consumers began to lose their appetite for synthetic dyes, too. A survey of some 26,000 American adults over the last three years shows that a full half of them say they want to avoid artificial colours and preservatives.
A recent Nielsen poll ranked the absence of artificial food dyes as the third-most-important factor in food-purchasing decisions among consumers worldwide.
Parents have created YouTube testimonials and petitions on change.org claiming that their children have become more focused or their nightmares have gone away after cutting artificial dyes from their diet. Videos and blogs show toddlers turning into “monsters” minutes after eating synthetically coloured candies and cupcakes.
Some people appeal to companies directly, like the mother of a 9-year-old named Trenton, who said her son abruptly stopped being disruptive at school and hockey practice after he quit eating artificial colours. Her petition to Mars to make M&Ms — one of the boy’s favourite candies — with natural colours received nearly 217,000 signatures.
There are things we still don’t know about how artificial colours interact with the human body. Research shows that Blue No 1 is the only dye that crosses the blood-brain barrier, which exists to protect the brain from toxins and pathogens. It enters the fluid inside the skull, but scientists know almost nothing about what it does once it’s there.
Rather than continue to defend themselves against these growing concerns, big food companies last year began making public commitments to give up synthetic dyes. Fulfilling those promises has set off a quest for novel colours that calls to mind the preindustrial days when explorers and traders traveled the world collecting indigo from South Asia or a dark red powder derived from cochineal insects used by the Aztecs…..