Because foods that are naturally blue hardly exist, the color doesn’t trigger our appetites. Sure, there are blueberries, blue corn, and the moldy veins in blue cheese to rev our palates. But leafy vegetables and meats don’t fall into that spectrum, thanks respectively to chlorophyll and blood.
So unless you lust regularly after those foods—as well as for artificially colored blue M&Ms and similar confections—the brain simply isn’t wired to crave blue sustenance.
Yet there’s an ambitious team of scientists from reputable laboratories making headway in developing a natural replacement for blue food dye. In doing so, they’ve turned to a pigment found in red cabbage, called anthocyanin.
The water-soluble pigment, integral also to blueberries, can be restructured on a molecular level to produce a striking cyan blue color. Such efforts have been in the making for a while by Mars Wrigley’s Advanced Research Institute, which partnered with chemists from universities in California, Ohio, Japan, Italy and France.
In addition to chewing gum, snacks and savory foods, Mars Wrigley makes a plethora of candies such as Skittles, Starburst, M&Ms, and Twix. The company claims it is committed to doing away with as many artificial food dyes as possible, thus it will soon begin using the natural-blue coloring in some of its sugar products.
Industry experts predict it’s only a matter of time before other food manufacturers come knocking for the coloring. But the question is whether consumers will embrace things like cakes, ice cream, sauces, and other edibles possessing a promised beautiful shade of blue.