Some of America's most familiar candies are getting a makeover. The Mars company is now selling M&M's, Skittles and Starburst without artificial food dye colors, a change that means the treats may look a little different even if they still melt in your mouth and not in your hand.
To keep the candies colorful, Mars has turned to ingredients pulled from nature rather than a lab. According to the company, beets are being used to make the red color, giving one of M&M's signature shades a plant-based source.
Other colors rely on a similar approach. Turmeric is being used to create yellow, and both the beet-based red and the turmeric yellow are mixed with an algae to produce green, replacing the synthetic dyes that had long done the job.
Not every color has been easy to recreate. Mars says the hardest colors to replicate with natural ingredients are brown, blue and purple, shades that do not map neatly onto the fruits, vegetables and other everyday sources the company is now drawing from.
The company says the switch was carefully worked out before it reached store shelves. The new recipes were tested in Mars's research and development kitchen, and the company says they are safe for consumers to eat.
Mars also leaned heavily on customer feedback in making the change. The company says it talked to more than 13,000 consumers over the past year, and found that people were open to the tone and hue of the candy changing slightly, but were absolutely not open to any change in the taste.
The reformulation comes against a wider push in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration is working with other companies to phase out artificial food dyes, colorings that have been linked to health issues, signaling that Mars is unlikely to be the last big brand to overhaul its recipes.