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There’s a new way to taste the rainbow.
Soon, three of America’s most iconic candies — M&M’s, Skittles and Starburst — will be sold with natural ingredients that recreate the candies’ famously vibrant (and artificial) hues. The treats will be available on Amazon, and cost the same as those with the usual artificial coloring.
Parent company Mars Inc. announced the swap last year, citing changing consumer preferences, plus a 2025 announcement by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to phase out potentially harmful synthetic petroleum dyes from the U.S. food supply chain.
For years, dyes such as Red No. 4 and Yellow No. 5 have been used to help color most candy. But in the past 15 years, those pigments have been increasingly linked to childhood hyperactivity and potential allergic reactions in scientific studies.
To keep the sweets looking bright, Mars swapped the dyes with new hues that come from natural ingredients like beet juice (for red) and turmeric (for yellow).
Blends of turmeric, beet juice and the blue-green algae spirulina make up the green candies, including the famously flirty green M&M, while a mix of beta-carotene and carotenoids makes some candy pieces orange. As for purple Skittles, Mars is dyeing them with grape juice.
According to Claire Hewitt, Mars’ senior director of ingredient transformation, blue and brown have proven more challenging shades to produce au naturel because it’s harder for them to maintain color consistency.
“I think it’s the vibrancy,” said Hewitt in an interview with ABC’s Rebecca Jarvis on Good Morning America, which was broadcast from a lab kitchen in Hackettstown, New Jersey. “And I think the scale, we need to be consistent.”
The change comes as “wellness” becomes a national buzzword, and once-niche items like collagen supplements and organic beef tallow hit supermarket shelves and TikTok accounts at an unprecedented rate.
But Hewitt said that Mars was well ahead of the trend, spending over a decade on new research and testing, ingredient revisions and evolved manufacturing capabilities. She claims that Mars has sought the input of over 13,000 consumers in the last year alone.
When searching the Amazon link for the new candies, be sure to look for the “no FD&C colors” label to get your sugar high without the dye.
