M&M's are about to look a little different. In August, Mars will roll out the first bags of M&M's made without artificial colors—but featuring only red, orange, yellow, and green pieces, while temporarily dropping blue and brown, reports the Wall Street Journal. The shift follows pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his "Make America Healthy Again" push to get synthetic dyes out of popular foods, as well as state-level crackdowns and a Texas investigation into Mars' marketing around dyes.
The Telegraph notes that Kennedy has already barred Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B dyes, with the FDA working on also phasing out a variety of others. Figuring out natural colors has turned into a multimillion-dollar headache for the candymaker, which produces 600 million M&M's a day in the US, per the Journal. Beets and turmeric handled red, orange, and yellow, while green can be achieved with spirulina, a blue-green algae.
Blue, however, has become what one dye executive calls the "holy grail." Mars turned to spirulina for that, too, but its blue candies need more spirulina than green ones, and the algae tends to clog spray nozzles, leading to cleanup after making the blues that would be too disruptive to production. Brown M&M's also partly depend on blue coloring to achieve their hue.
About 100 Mars staffers are now focused on the project, a quarter of them just on blue, as the company aims to have all six classic colors in natural form by 2028. The new, more natural M&M's will be sold only on Amazon for the moment; the artificial version will remain on store shelves. The Independent notes that other food manufacturers are also trying to go the MAHA route, including PepsiCo, which has debuted its "Simply NKD" line of snacks without artificial dyes or flavors, including Doritos and Cheetos.
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