(Bloomberg Businessweek) —
If a potato chip isn’t bright red, will people know it’s spicy? This type of question kicked off a yearlong effort by PepsiCo Inc.’s marketing innovation, research and development, and consumer insights teams to invent a new kind of seasoning. The result will hit grocery store shelves in North America on March 3: Simply Ruffles Hot & Spicy. The chips are not flaming red. They’re orangish and speckled with spices, but placed next to the famous Ruffles Flamin’ Hots, these chips are basically beige.
Still, they are mouth scorchers, with a heat that builds as you chew and lingers after you swallow—unlike Flamin’ Hots, which punch you in the mouth as soon as they hit your tongue. But appearances matter as much as flavor does. Flamin’ Hots get their cartoonishly red color from much-maligned (but still legal) artificial dyes, Red No. 40 and Yellow No. 6. The newer chips use tomato powder and red chile pepper.
“You could make it redder if you wanted to,” says Ian Puddephat, vice president of research and development for food ingredients at PepsiCo. But, he says, the company chose not to. A lighter color tells the consumer that not only is this chip spicy, it’s natural, too.
The Simply brand—marketed as free of artificial flavors and dyes—has been around since 2013, but it’s now having a moment. PepsiCo’s chief executive officer, Ramon Laguarta, highlighted it in a recent conference call with investors as part of an effort to reignite the company’s snack business by tapping into growing consumer demand for more natural products. “There’s a higher level of awareness in general of American consumers toward health and wellness,” he said.
That’s stirring a sense of urgency across the packaged food industry, which was heightened last year after a high-profile boycott of WK Kellogg Co.’s cereal. The consequences of that campaign extend far beyond Froot Loops. In one of the final acts of President Joe Biden’s administration, the US Food and Drug Administration banned Red No. 3, effective in January 2027 for food, one of a handful of synthetic colors that have become something of a symbol of all that is wrong with the American food system and the ultraprocessed foods that dominate it.
Putting Red No. 3 aside, the rest of the colors remain legal, and they’re used in tens of thousands of supermarket and convenience-store products in the US, according to NielsenIQ data. The recent campaign against them became one of the pillars of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The criticism follows what health advocates have been saying for years: The synthetic colors add nothing to taste, nutritional value or shelf life but make unhealthy foods more visually appealing. Worst of all, there are concerns that the dyes may be carcinogenic or trigger hyperactivity in some kids.
Puddephat says PepsiCo is “on a mission to get them out of the portfolio as much as we can.” He calls it “a mountain” of a task. Researchers at the company’s Frito-Lay headquarters in Plano, Texas, a sprawling campus that is, coincidentally, shaped like a Dorito, typically take 12 to 18 months to get a product from conception to store shelves. Removing artificial dyes from existing products can take a lot longer.
PepsiCo has a dozen brands, including Simply, that don’t have the artificial dyes, and the company is working to pull them out of an additional eight brands in the next year. Brightly colored favorites Doritos and Cheetos are works in progress, Puddephat says. His team has been trying to scale this artificial dye mountain for years, but natural colors present some challenges. They’re sensitive to light and can introduce “off flavors,” and the supply chain for colors like a radish’s red or annatto’s orange is not as robust as that for Red No. 40 or Yellow No. 6.
And unlike with a new snack such as Simply Ruffles Hot & Spicy, people’s expectations for Nacho Cheese Doritos are practically immutable. “It’s really, really hard to reformulate existing products,” Puddephat says. Consumers “are very good at noticing very small changes.”
Companies are trying anyway, and the dyes are just one piece of the puzzle. Namrata Shah, a partner at consulting firm Kearney’s PERLab, which works with foodmakers to revamp products, says this January was the busiest she had ever seen. PERLab, which didn’t work on the new Simply Ruffles, has been assisting companies on these kinds of redesigns for years, but between the ongoing consumer push toward better-for-you products, possible regulations, supply chain concerns and general economic uncertainty, companies are looking closely at what needs an upgrade. “The pressure is high,” Shah says.
A food industry horror story, frequently cited in reformulation discussions, is the Trix debacle of 2016. General Mills Inc., swept up in an anti-food-dye fervor, swapped out the artificials for naturals in the “fruity” breakfast cereal, drastically changing the colors from bright reds, blues and oranges to a more muted palette of dark purple, slightly lighter pinkish-purple and taupe. Consumers balked, and General Mills put the artificials back in the following year.
Vani Hari, a longtime food activist better known as Food Babe who launched the anti-Kellogg boycott and is now an unofficial adviser to Kennedy, says Trix should have been “savvy enough” to better market the new product. That seems to be exactly what PepsiCo is trying to do with Simply.
For every Trix, however, there’s a mac and cheese. In 2016, Kraft Heinz Foods Co. announced that it’d made good on an earlier promise to get artificial dyes out of its recipe—and apparently, nobody noticed. “We just haven’t told that story,” says Carlos Abrams-Rivera, Kraft Heinz’s CEO. (The lack of artificial dyes is more prominent on the boxes now.)
This month the company is also adding a naturally hued product to its Mio brand, a line of water enhancers, but it’s not taking the artificially enhanced options off the market. It still has artificial dyes in Kool-Aid, too, and doesn’t have immediate plans to remove them. “Let’s make sure that we are not ahead of the consumer, that we’re walking with the consumer,” Abrams-Rivera says. “Kool-Aid is a great, affordable and accessible product for kids and families.”
During a recent presentation at a food industry conference in Orlando, Conagra Brands Inc., which owns brands such as Slim Jim, Duncan Hines and Birds Eye, said 92% of its products are free of synthetic dyes. Afterward, CEO Sean Connolly told reporters that the company would comply with regulations if forced to remove dyes from the few remaining products that still have them, but for now, they’re letting consumers decide. Connolly noted that Conagra removed a yellow dye from Vlasic pickles and replaced it with turmeric. (That was in 2019, years before RFK Jr. got hip to the dyes agenda.) But, Connolly added, “consumer preference is not a monolithic thing.”
Dye makers are riding the wave. Interest in natural colors has been building for some time, says Paul Manning, CEO of Sensient Technologies, a massive producer of both synthetic and natural colors. “Certainly in the last few months,” he adds, “the slope has accelerated significantly.”
To contact the author of this story:
Deena Shanker in New York at dshanker@bloomberg.net
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