Turning wobbly blobs of clear gelatin red or orange using natural ingredients takes beet juice and a touch of annatto from the seeds of a tropical tree.
But making gelatin green? That one is difficult for Simple Mixes, a company that makes naturally flavored and colored gelatin. Its founder, Malathy Nair, uses a blend of yellow turmeric extract with spirulina, an extract from algae that produces shades of green and blue.
But spirulina tends to form clumps (who wants floaties in gelatin?) and can have an off-putting taste that Dr. Nair describes as “seedy.” To overcome the unwelcome flavor, she has to use more natural lime flavor, making green the most expensive gelatin her company produces.
Even after all that, the gelatin isn’t a saturated, bright green. It’s dull. The color lands somewhere between moss and spinach. “I’m not that happy with how the green looks,” concedes Dr. Nair, who holds a Ph.D. in food science.
Turning Jell-O green using natural colorings is one of the many challenges Kraft Heinz is likely to face after announcing this month that it will remove artificial dyes from all its foods by the end of 2027. The manufacturer joins other food companies, like General Mills, Danone North America and PepsiCo, that are planning to dump artificial colors in the next couple of years.
Across the country, food scientists are mixing fruit and vegetable juices with spices in a race to create blends of colors that can replicate artificial dyes currently widely used in foods, drinks and snacks found in most American pantries.
The change is the result of pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Make America Healthy Again supporters who aim to eliminate synthetic food dyes, which they say are dangerous to children’s health and development. Some states, including West Virginia and, more recently, Texas, have passed their own rules, either banning or requiring warning labels on foods containing the popular and widely used petroleum-based dyes as well as other additives.
Colors derived from fruits, vegetables and plants are typically more muted and have a tendency to fade, especially if exposed to heat or light. Moreover, natural dyes tend to be more expensive, in part because greater quantities have to be used to achieve close to desired shades.
That runs counter to the longstanding ethos of a multibillion-dollar industry that produces food and beverages in almost any Pantone shade that can sit on store shelves or in pantries for weeks or months without losing the intensity of their color and are affordable for price-sensitive consumers.
This isn’t the first time the food and beverage industry have tried to make the shift. About a decade ago, major companies tried to move away from artificial colors. Some were successful, like Kraft’s Mac & Cheese, which used turmeric and paprika to achieve its well-known bright orange sauce for the pasta. But other attempts failed.
In 2016, Kraft released a line of puddings and gelatins made with no artificial dyes or flavors called Simply Good Jell-O. The line was quietly discontinued a couple of years later.
“There were some early adopters. Some products were reformulated to respond to the demand at the time for natural ingredients,” said M. Monica Giusti, a professor in the food science and technology department atOhio State University. “When they introduced the new product into the market, consumers didn’t accept it.”
A spokeswoman for Kraft Heinz said the company intended to reintroduce the Simply Good line in 2026, but provided no further details. She confirmed that the original flavors and colors did not include lime green Jell-O.
For food companies, some colors are easier to replicate naturally than others. Red, for instance, can be produced from beet juice, red cabbage, radishes or even carmine, a vivid crimson dye derived from the crushed-up shell of the cochineal insect. Likewise, yellow can come from turmeric, safflower, golden beets and annatto.
Creating the base blue to mix with yellow to get green is a challenge because the color doesn’t naturally occur in nature. Blueberries, when crushed, create more of a dark red or even purple mash, rather than blue.
For green, there’s chlorophyll, a pigment found in spinach and kale, but it produces darker shades of green and is unstable, turning olive green or even brownish. “Green is one of the most difficult colors to create naturally,” said Elad Tako, an associate professor in the department of food science at Cornell University. “But it tends to bring an unwanted flavor and degrades over time.”
Spirulina was supposed to be the holy grail for the food and beverage industry, but it has its own challenges. An extract from algae, it creates a blue shade that is very close to Brilliant Blue, or Blue No. 1, a synthetic dye that tints the moons blue in Lucky Charms cereal and makes Gatorade Cool Blue bright in bottles.
In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration approved the petition by the candy company Mars, allowing the spirulina-derived extract called phycocyanin to become the first natural blue dye for food. It works fairly well when used in foods that have low temperatures and aren’t acidic, like yogurt or ice cream, say food scientists.
“But similar to other natural sources, this pigment is highly sensitive to light and can break down under heat, which is how a lot of food products are made,” Dr. Tako said.
And while spirulina is relatively easy to grow — it’s like algae that form naturally on a lake — manufacturing it for human consumption requires tightly controlled conditions. Some spirulina is grown in the California desert, on shallow, artificial ponds that are carefully monitored and controlled before the algae are harvested, washed and dried into powder.
Ful Foods, a supplier of spirulina powder, partners with companies that grow the algae in photobioreactors, long, clear tubes stacked in warehouses, with specially controlled light and temperature. Founded in 2020, the company has been fielding more calls from food companies looking for natural alternatives that can turn foods, candy or beverages bright blue, its executives say.
While most spirulina is not stable in foods or beverages that are acidic or in higher heat environments, the company said it had an extraction and stabilization process that allowed its spirulina to remain bright blue.
“With most natural colors, there are very compelling benefits, but also some challenges,” said Julia Streuli, a co-founder and chief executive of Ful Foods. “But none of them are insurmountable.”
Still, like most natural dyes, spirulina is more expensive to use than artificial alternatives.
Dr. Nair of Simple Mixes pays about $25 a pound for spirulina. And she has to use significantly more of the blue dye as well as other natural colors, compared with artificial dyes, to achieve the reds, oranges and greens in her company’s gelatin mixes.
That expense, along with the costs from natural flavors and kosher gelatin, drives up the price she charges. She sells largely through Amazon, where a three-pack of strawberry, orange and lime gelatin is $11.98. A box of Jell-O from a grocery store in New Jersey cost $1.49 this month.
Dr. Nair said large companies like Kraft Heinz would probably negotiate lower prices for their natural dyes. But as more food and beverage companies move away from artificial colors, she said, she hopes the result will be less expensive natural dye options— and better shades of green.
Julie Creswell is a business reporter covering the food industry for The Times, writing about all aspects of food, including farming, food inflation, supply-chain disruptions and climate change.
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