M&M’s Will Temporarily Stop Producing Two Colors

Photo by Oksana Zub on Unsplash

Food News! 

Believe it or not, it’s been 31 years since BLUE M&M’s replaced TAN ones.  And now, there’s another color change in the news involving blue and brown M&M’s.

Mars is rolling out a new version of M&M’s without artificial dyes, which will be exclusively available on Amazon in August.  Those special packs will NOT have any BLUE and BROWN M&M’s, because they’re still in the process of finding alternative coloring options for those two.

The missing blue and brown M&M’s is NOT a permanent change… so there won’t be any surveys or campaigns to determine new colors.  But the new natural M&M’s will be the future.

Mars already has natural color options for red, orange, yellow, and green… though they might appear different, and less vivid.  For those colors, they’re using ingredients like beets and turmeric to create dyes.

For blue, they chose a high-protein algae some refer to as a superfood, and others call “pond scum.”  But it has been gumming up the factory machines, so they’re figuring out if they need to change the machines, or find something else that’s blue.

Brown is a problem because it actually requires blue coloring to create.

When the government first started pressing companies to eliminate the dyes, Mars considered changing the colors, or reducing them… but for now they are committed to making the previous colors happen, eventually.

There’s a whole team working on color solutions, and the process has been a “multimillion-dollar initiative.”

Mars is aiming to offer its naturally-colored M&M’s in all six colors by 2028.  By then, it sounds like the artificially-dyed M&M’s will be phased out.

The special packs will be marked as free of synthetic dyes… and the regular packs will remain available in stores for the foreseeable future.

SOURCES: People / Wall Street Journal