Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. The other day, our producer Julia Press pulled me into the studio with a sweeter than usual assignment.
I have treats brought back from my tour of the Welchi's Fruit Snacks factory. I brought two types of fruit snacks for you to try. This old type that they're phasing out and the new type that they're rolling out. And there's one key difference. The old type included a little bit of artificial dyes added in for color. The new type only gets their dies from natural sources fruits and vegetables.
This switch has been a long time in the making. Welch's has been on a decade long odyssey to swap out artificial flavors for natural ones. But it's now something the Trump administration wants all companies to do as part of its crusade to quote make America healthy again.
Okay, dump them out. How did they look to you? So they look exactly the same, you think? Okay, let's do a side by side comparison. Let's start with raspberry.
All right, old kind, a little more clear, a little more vibrant. New kind, firmer, skinnier, and a little more muted, but only slightly.
They do look pretty much identical.
They look pretty much identical.
Okay, let's do a taste test. Close your eyes.
Number one, I'm really getting taken back to middle school here.
You look blissed out.
It tastes so good.
Okay.
Number two, spoiler alert, I couldn't tell the difference. Well, I just had two delicious fruit snacks that tasted exactly the same. Really, if you had to guess, was the first one the old kind and the second one the new kind?
No?
Oh, the opposit.
Making a near replica of this popular product was time consuming, costly, and complicated, and as other companies try to pull this off, Welch's case study could reveal a lot about the challenges that lie ahead for the American food industry. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today. On the show, as the Trump Administration's MAHA movement encourages more and more food and drink companies to rework their formulas, we visit one company that's done it to see what
it takes. What's the first thing you think of when you think of Welch's fruit snacks.
I think of vending machines like soccer practice, where like you're you know, deciding.
You know, how you're going to spend your two dollars and fifty cents that you've scrowned up.
Yes, they were in my middle school vending machine too.
Yeah, yeah, and we would.
Like get them during lunch and kind of like swap colors and things like that.
Yeah, personally avoiding the orange one.
That's Bloomberg reporter Will Kobzanski. He recently went with our producer Julia to tour A. Welch's Fruits next production plant in New Jersey because.
They have begun rolling out products without any synthetic food dies. So that's you know, Red forty blue number one, and you know, they had just started making this transition on its flagship product, the mixed fruit variety.
Food dyes are in the headlines a lot these days.
Four years from now, we're going to have most of these products off the market, or you will know about them when.
You They've been thrust into the spotlight by Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Junior. We have them on the run now and we are going to win this battle. That battle he's talking about is the war on ultra processed foods, specifically the artificial dyes that are often in those ultra processed foods, like petroleum based red forty. So far, it's been more of a
pressure campaign than an all out war. The FDA hasn't banned these dies outright, but RFK has encouraged companies to drop them by the end of next year.
There's lots of other things he cares about, seed oils, He talks a lot about ultra processed foods. Synthetic dies, though, are the area where we've seen the most change, the fastest, and the most response from companies that are subject to his regulations.
What does the research say, What kind of health effects do synthetic dies and artificial dies actually have on consumers?
So there's no like slam dunk piece of evidence that sort of says one way or the other synthetic food dies are really good or really bad. The FDA considers them safe, and the FDA has not revoked the regulation authorizing the use of synthetic food dies. If you want to, you could still put red forty in your product right now.
There's some state laws you'd have to navigate in the late two thousands, there is a UK study that showed that there's some association with hyperactivity in children from synthetic dies. In twenty ten, the EU said we're going to put a warning label on anything that has a synthetic food die in it. In twenty eleven, the USFDA did a similar review. They said, we don't see any causal effect between adverse behaviors and food dies. We don't see the need to put a warning label on Although that was
like a little more closely contested. About a decade later, California reviewed the evidence and said, actually, we do think there's a link, and that evidence sort of got passed along the chain, and a couple of years later, Gavin Newsom signed a bill that prohibits the use of synthetic food dies in schools. Beginning in twenty twenty eight.
About a fifth of products on American grocery store shelves contain synthetic food dies in twenty twenty. That's according to a study published by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics this year.
That number's probably gone down since twenty twenty because companies have like sort of started to since where the wind is blowing and they've been trying to get rid of them in their new products. But where they found them most often sugary beverages, sugary treats, things often marketed at kids.
You can do the math right.
If something looks good, if something looks bright and exciting and colorful, you're going to be more likely to want to eat it, especially if you're like, you know, a six year old at the Walmart with your dad looking at the cereal aisle.
That brings us back to Welches. Since two thousand and one, a company called pim Brands has been making these fruit snacks and licensing the Welsh name from the juice and
jelly maker. Historically, the company's formula contains some artificial dyes in addition to the natural color that comes from the fruit purese inside, but in twenty fifteen it started experimenting with reducing its dependency on synthetic dies, and last month it announced they'd be fully phased out of all its fruit snack products by early twenty twenty six.
We are outside the pim Brands factory in Somerset, New Jersey, where they make Welsish fruit snacks.
We have nearly a million square feet dedicated to manufacturing, packaging, and distributing Welsis fruit snacks, which go across North America. Actually from this facility we also saw.
That's Michael Rosenberg, Pinbrands CEO who showed Will and Julia around.
It felt closer to like the Model T production line than it did Willy Wonka. It's one of these office parks that's sort of like you wouldn't know it exists unless you had a reason to go to it. And you walk into this factory, it just sort of smells like warm fruit. It smells like a.
Fruit snack in here.
Isn't like a like a pie, like a fruit pie. Like I'm trying to figure out what this reminds me of.
Well, so, because of the number of fruits in our product, you don't smell any particular fruit. You just get this incredibly fruit smelling aroma.
Just like a remarkable amount of movement in the factory. I found. The fruit snacks themselves are going into the molds, they're being shaken out, they're being transported across the factory and like a conveyor belt set up. You know, massive facility people you know, wearing their safety equipment, fruit snacks going on all kinds of conveyor else enough little fruit
snack elevators and machines doling out packages and pouches. How much, generally speaking does it cost to build a facility like this?
Each production line costs between fifteen and twenty million dollars. We have six production lines, and then of course you have all the packaging part. So there's a fortune in this building.
The factory can turn out over ten billion pouches of fruit snacks a year. Will and Julia sat down with the team responsible for Welch's fruit snacks pivot to natural dies and they told them it's been a long road.
So this process, according to them, started in twenty fifteen, so a decade ago. They're chief officer of R and D. She won noticed the products are made with real fruit. So you know, part of the Welchi's fruit snacks, like the stick is you know, a strawberry fruit snack is made with real strawberry pure So there's already a little color from those fruits in there.
It inheritently comes with some natural color. And we were adding so many school amounts, so I was thinking, if he can introduce that, why not.
Bavna Romani that R and D director also noticed that synthetic dyes were starting to lose favor internationally, so Bavna and her team started tinkering. They took it one color at a time. First up yellow, the low hanging fruit, so to speak. She said, yellow was easier to swap out because there are lots of natural sources of the color and enough supply of those substitutes in the market.
They're replaced some with turmeric and anato, and it was a relatively easy switch. Kraft mac and Cheese made a very similar switch around that time.
Nato is a yellow coloring made from a tree seed, but other colors were harder to match. Here's Bavna.
Unfortunately, there was no true replacement for the blue because there are not too many blue fruits for vegetable, because all natural colors are derived from real fruits and vegetable and in reality, if you go to the supermarket, it's not too many choices.
Don't replace that.
It's not just can we match the exact shade, it's can the shade last over time? Is the pH imbalance between the dye and the fruit period that's already in there. Is that going to make the fruit snack turned brown over time.
For the blue color, they settled on spirillina, a type of algae, and a fruit called tueto found in South and Central America. Getting a new raspberry gummy to look and taste just like the old gummy so that unsuspecting eaters like me can't tell the difference took the R and D team close to fifty different trials to replace
red forty. They used ingredients like purple carrot and red grape, and once they figured out the right combination of ingredients, they had to find a way to make the colors consistent.
Fruit grow in North America versus South America, it has a different taste, different color.
They needed to find the suppliers natural eyes work with the suppliers to make sure that when the food die is transported, like it's not getting any adverse impacts from
temperature changes in the supply chain. They needed to work with them to stabilize the acidity of the food dies because it was interacting with the fruit that was in their fruit snacks, and like, you need to make sure it doesn't just turn round in like three months, six months, nine months, a year over the course of the full shelf life.
Of the product.
You have to do R and D, you have to find the right people, you need to do the testing. Things that cost money, and.
It comes with risk, not just financial risk, but the risk of alienating customers. We get into that and how other companies are trying to make similar changes after the break. When it comes to swapping out synthetic dyes with natural dyes, wel Jess Fruit Snacks was a little earlier to the party, but now many other companies are starting to follow suit. PepsiCo is the latest company to jump on the Maha bandwagon,
announcing plans to remove artificial colors and flavors. Craft is announcing they will no longer be launching any products that have artificial die in the general mills, announcing it will remove artificial colors from its US cereals n K through twelfth school Foods by next summer.
A lot of what we've seen so far are commitments to do it.
Let's talk about some of those commitments. How quickly are these companies saying that they'll do this.
So the timeline that most companies have given is by the end of twenty twenty seven beginning of twenty twenty eight. That's a specific date because beginning on January first, twenty twenty eight, if you want to sell your product in West Virginia, you can't have synthetic dies in it. There are similar laws going into affecting the California schools Texas. The feasibility is another question.
Remember, for Welch's the changeover took a decade. It took a full year just to test that the new colors wouldn't fade over the course of the product's shelf life. But does that mean it will take a decade for everyone else to do it too. Maybe not Welches.
They have a more complex product than like a Scale or a Starburst. There's the fruit in there, vitamins and minerals and things like that. And also, you know, compared to Mars or Hershey or Mandalize or a smaller company. Right, no one is explicitly said as much to me, but like they don't have the same leverage that you know, a massive multinational might have to secure these food dies. On the other hand, they've been working on this for ten years, they've been thinking about it for a long time.
The question is matching the shades.
Customers, you know, when they open a box of Welch's fruit snacks or a box of M and ms or you know, their cereal. They want to recognize the product that they know.
There's a lot at stake when you start tinkering with a classic recipe. General Mills learn that the hard way when it tried this with Trick Cereal back in twenty sixteen, and.
Then the American consumer was appalled.
The tricks did not look like the tricks that they had grown to love, and they very quickly made the switchback.
Ten years later, the American consumer might be more comfortable with this kind of change, and if they aren't already, they could just get used to it.
I talked with someone who runs one of these natural eye companies, and something funny he said was Europeans when they see that like bright synthetic red forty shade, they're like, oh my god, there must be like something wrong with it. It looks like it was made in a chemical plant.
There are other reasons a larger corporation could have an easier time than PIM did. Those companies may operate in countries where they're already asked to put warning labels on duyed products, or were they're not allowed to use synthetic dyes, so they may have a head start on the replacement process. How much of the motivation of these companies to rework these formulas is part of kind of making the current administration happy versus these broader globe forces.
It's a good question putting aside RFK, MAHA and sort of the cultural lane it tapped into, Like there are people who are interested in this, there are people who don't want their kids to consume synthetic dies. What I would say is that RFK is making a lot of other asks right. There are seed oils, which are you know, canola sun flower seed oil, things like that. He wants those removed from the food supply. He would like things to the effect of limits on how much sugar we
consume and the ultra process foods we consume. I can't read the mind of these CEOs and the folks who are doing their public affairs. But objectively changing one or two ingredients where there's an existing replacement and in fact it's already used internationally feels like a lighter lift than making these more fundamental changes to how you fry your product, how you consider your product process or ultra process, to the amount of sugar in there right.
Well, that brings us to sort of a broader final question, which is that the stated goal of these changes per R is to make Americans healthier. Is there a significant health benefit here or are these mostly aesthetic changes that are easier to achieve.
It's a question I don't have a complete answer.
Yeah too, Yeah, there's some discourse on this because RFKS took something of a victory lap when Kellogg's cut its.
Synthetic food dies.
Anytime a company cuts its synthetic food dies, he'll put out a tweet and he'll say it's a MAHA win.
And the Kellogg's wone got picked up and.
It kind of sparked this broader conversation about you know, if you're eating the French fries but they're made with beef tallow instead of being friend to seed oil, and you're having the fruit loop still and they're still full of sugar, but like they don't have the red forty in them, the question sort of becomes like how much of an impact is this happening versus like how much does this just sort of Maha being able to take the win. The administration would contend that this is the
first change of many to come. They want to fundamentally change the way we eat in this country. They're going to try and make some pretty big changes to the dietary guidelines that are coming out later this summer. Where the alternative take is the companies saw an easy place to score some points, and we'll see what happens with the rest of the changes.
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.