If you were anything like me as a kid, trick-or-treating meant one, maybe two, pillowcases full of candy every Halloween.
And as fun as collecting all that candy could be, the real fun began when I got home and dumped my winnings onto my bedroom floor. That’s when the sorting began.
I had some very specific rules: The usual suspects — think Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and Dum Dums — went into one pile. Fun-size chocolates, like Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Baby Ruths, went into another. And then there was my prized pile: Skittles, Warheads, Starbursts, and Sour Patch Kids. Those were meant to be eaten slowly throughout November. The rest was fair game.
The ways we sort and eat our Halloween candy are decided by some very particular, personal rules. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would like to add another distinction: Which candies are made with artificial dyes?
Kennedy’s ire for synthetic food dyes is years old, and they’ve become a major target of his Make America Healthy Again movement. Last year, he announced a plan to remove “petroleum-based synthetic dyes” from foods, arguing that companies “shouldn’t be feeding it to the rest of us.”
That plan has become a multimillion-dollar problem for Mars, the maker of M&Ms, which promised customers last year that they would create an all-natural version of their tasty chocolatey treats. As the Wall Street Journal reported this summer, however, its latest offering is missing one of the most iconic colored M&Ms — the blue M&M.
M&Ms aren’t the only snack food in Kennedy’s crosshairs: He has called out Doritos, Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, and gummy bears, saying their ingredients include “a lot of poisons.” On Fox News, he described what children eat as “food-like substances” and also said that “some of it was made in petroleum refineries.”
In reality, the evidence is more complicated, because the Food and Drug Administration has long considered many of these approved synthetic dyes to be safe under its rules, while acknowledging that some children may be sensitive to them. Kennedy’s sweeping accusations go much further.
Still, pressure from Kennedy and those in the MAHA movement has led many companies to rethink the recipes of your favorite snacks. But producing those alternatives isn’t easy or cheap, as the story of the blue M&M illustrates.
Jesse Newman, a food reporter for the Wall Street Journal, went inside a Mars factory in Topeka, Kansas, to see the process for herself. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about why blue is so difficult to produce naturally, and what changing a candy’s color actually accomplishes.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., has some issues with the blue M&M. What, what exactly happened? How did it draw his attention?
He is not a fan of any sort of chemical. He’s really concerned about toxins in our food. And Blue 1, which is the food dye that makes blue M&Ms blue, is a synthetic chemical.
He really takes issue with artificial dyes. He believes that they cause hyperactivity in kids, some neurological challenges. He thinks artificial dyes are linked to cancer.
As a member of the Trump administration, he formally set out to get them removed, didn’t he?
Oh yeah. He’s been putting a lot of pressure on the industry to strip artificial dyes from all kinds of products.
What do we know factually about artificial dyes? We hear that they’re bad for us. We hear that a lot of things are bad for us. We’re all still alive and kicking. Are artificial dyes really detrimental to our health?
The FDA for decades has said that there are nine artificial dyes approved for use in food. And they said that those artificial dyes are safe and have said so for years and years and years, as have other global bodies, so long as they’re used in accordance with some of the standards that the FDA laid out.
A California state agency has found that dyes are linked again to hyperactivity in children. And the FDA itself has said, ‘Okay, we think that these dyes are safe for the vast majority of kids, but some kids might be more sensitive to them than others.’
So I think the real issue is that it’s a chemical doing it. They’re purely cosmetic. They don’t do anything except color food. There is no nutritional benefit that you are getting from these dyes. And so do we need them? Absolutely not.
I think one of the issues is that if you’re looking at the ways our food contributes to health problems, artificial dyes are probably pretty low on the list.
You went inside a factory where they make M&Ms, and you looked at how they’re trying to make this happen. Tell me everything.
I went to this plant in Topeka, Kansas, to see how they were made. And it’s a massive industrial food plant, where they mix these colors and spray them onto these small chocolate orbs, which they refer to as lentils.
The M&Ms move through the plant, and they arrive at these massive [machines] that they call pans, but they look like big tumble dryers. And the M&Ms just tumble around in these pans, and the color is sprayed on. It’s a very, very industrial process, millions of M&Ms a day. And the challenge that Mars has now is making that happen with a natural dye instead of an artificial one.
A blue natural dye is the challenge. What are the problems?
They’ve been working on this for years. And they went with a product called spirulina, which is made from algae. But spirulina comes with a host of problems that they are now dealing with.
Blue 1, which is the artificial dye, arrives at the factories as a liquid. And they pour it into these mixers and they mix it up with this sugary syrup and it’s pretty easy to handle. Spirulina arrives as a powder. So now you’re mixing a powder into this same mixture, into the same recipe, and that is very different.
Because spirulina is a protein, the resulting mixture becomes a lot thicker. What they found was that the mixture containing spirulina would really clog up the piping. It was getting stuck. It moved less smoothly through the pipes.
Also because it is a protein, it was starting to coat and build up on the inside of the machinery. And when that happens, it’s a food safety hazard. It can mold; it can cause problems. For many reasons, it was a challenge to handle.
How much did this all cost?
I should say it’s not done. Mars wouldn’t give me an official figure for how much they spent. But they said that they are spending millions and millions of dollars.
They’re having to retrofit their plants, essentially. Mars said that they’re having to change about 300 types of machinery in their plants. It’s a real investment. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to cost.
What did they actually end up getting done? What was the outcome here?
Mars said what they committed to was that they were going to release a new version of their M&Ms and a few other of their products this year that were made with natural dyes instead of artificial dyes.
They didn’t come out and say we’re eliminating artificial dyes. And so folks should be really clear about that: Their artificially dyed M&Ms aren’t going anywhere. They are still on shelves.
What they said is that they’re going to come out with an option that is naturally dyed. So they tried to do that. And what they found was that they couldn’t do it at a cost that was acceptable to them. With the blue and with the spirulina, it would have been far too expensive to make it work at scale. We’re talking millions and millions and millions of M&Ms per day.
They had problems making the green, the blue, and the brown M&M because, if you go back to your elementary school color theory, they needed blue to make all of those M&Ms. Ultimately they said, “Okay, we can do green. There’s little enough spirulina in the green to make the green M&M.” But blue and brown, they are not able to get there yet due to the amount of spirulina that those colors require.
And so earlier this year, they launched their naturally dyed version of M&Ms with red, orange, yellow, and green M&Ms. And if you take a look at this bag, my colleague referred to these as autumnal. They look very autumnal.
They look sort of muted.
You know, it really isn’t the same. It looks like a mature person’s M&M.
At the end of the day, what are the changes to the M&Ms? Let’s say I go online and get the natural dyed ones. What does that mean for my health? Am I now a healthy and virtuous person if I’m eating the autumnal M&Ms?
It means very little.
I would say you are, hopefully, still enjoying that sugary treat and the pick-me-up in the afternoon as you’re starting to tire. But you’re still eating candy; you’re still eating sugar. It really hasn’t changed very much.