Don't ask the question whether blue raspberry tastes like real raspberries. Raspberry just happened to be that "lucky" fruit.ĭoes this unnatural combination of blinding neon blue and toothaching sweetness-which was designed to attract undiscriminating children like flies, and whose best trait is that doesn't cause cancer in lab rats-deserve the scorn we discriminating adults heap upon it? Nope, Berenstein says: "Don't compare it to something that grows out of the ground. It seems like a no-brainer now, but back in the early part of the 20th century, De Groote was essentially writing the playbook for food chemists.īerenstein calls blue the "final frontier" for food coloring-it may have simply been a matter of what flavor got to claim it. "There's an appeal that really bright colors have, even when they're unnaturally colored, and especially for young children," Berenstein says. Children are innately drawn to vivid colors, De Groote realized. (Remember, you're actually tasting more "pineapple" and "banana" than raspberry in an artificially raspberry-flavored product.) On a visit to a circus, De Groote noticed that the lemonades that were colored naturally-that is, yellow or essentially colorless-might or might not sell well, but that pink lemonades-a color that no lemonade should ever naturally be-consistently sold out, and largely to children. Berenstein took us back to 1922 and the writings of influential American chemist Melvin De Groote, who was among the first to study the effect of colors on flavor-he proved, for example, that most people couldn't identify a soda as grape-flavored unless it was colored purple. So we asked Nadia Berenstein, a University of Pennsylvania food historian who specializes in the history of synthetic flavors. The people at Gold Medal, ICEE, and Otter Pops had evidently seen the writing on the wall well before the FDA hammer came down on Red No. A year or so later, Louie Blue and the blue ICEE made their debuts, created with the controversy-free colorant. 1 “permanently listed for food and ingested drug uses” in 1969. Meanwhile, the FDA had officially declared FD&C Blue No. 2 was safe and banned it outright, noting that there was significant evidence that the the dye caused tumors in lab rats. In 1976, in the face of years of growing consumer concerns, the FDA reversed decades of insistence that Red No. Despite the positive 1957 study, later research continued to link the dye to illnesses, including a 1971 Soviet study that blamed it for cancer. 2 played an integral role in birthing blue raspberry. It seems highly likely that the downfall of FD&C Red No. (Unfortunately, Trevino didn't manage to track down any company records explaining the Otter Pops bosses' decision making.) But it isn't the whole story. Woods's explanation confirms that that was definitely part of the thinking. Why the switch? Common sense suggests that because the field of "red" flavors was already so crowded-cherry, strawberry, watermelon, cinnamon, cranberry, red apple-and there are scarcely any blue foods in nature, raspberry was simply traded from Team Red to Team Blue to avoid confusion among consumers. And it wasn't to remain relegated to the freezer aisle forever: There are now blue raspberry Twizzlers (introduced in 2009, according to a Hershey's spokeswoman), and blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers (first rolled out in 2011), among other candies. In any case, the flavor obviously proved popular: We suck down some 132 million 16-ounce blue raspberry ICEEs every year. According to marketing director Laura Trevino of Jel Sert, the company that owns Otter Pops (as well as Fla-Vor-Ice), that was "around 1970"-meaning that both ICEE and Otter Pops have a strong claim to being responsible for taking blue raspberry from its apparent beginnings at circuses, fairs, and concession stands and unleashing it upon the larger consumer world. About the same time, Otter Pops-those tubes of frozen sugar water-introduced a new character and flavor, Louie Blue. "The color of blue raspberry flavor was strongly inspired by the blue color that is part of the ICEE brand." We came up with blue raspberry," Woods says. However, we wanted something that was a distinctly different color than our flagship flavor, cherry. "Raspberry tasted great as a frozen beverage.
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