Four Top Food Companies Are Removing the 6 Banned Color Additives

Slowly but surely, some members of the food & beverage industry are starting to remove synthetic colors banned by the FDA or individual states or covered by the FDA’s April 22 “request” for removal of six petroleum-based dyes.

Top executives of PepsiCo, Danone North America, TreeHouse Foods and Tyson in recent weeks said work was underway to remove the synthetic color additives from their products.

Officials from FDA and its parent, Dept. of Health & Human services, on April 22 said they had agreement from leaders of the food & beverage industry and were encouraging others to remove six petroleum-based colorants -- Blue 1 & 2, Green 3, Red 40 and Yellow 5 & 6 — from the food supply “by the end of next year.” Red 3 already has been banned as of Jan 15, 2027.

PepsiCo is transitioning right now, promising those colors will be out of at least Lay's and Tostitos products by the end of this year, Chairman/CEO Ramon Laguarta said at the company first-quarter financial call on April 24. No mention, however, of Cheetos, which uses Yellow 6.

“60-plus percent of our business today doesn't have any artificial colors. So we're well undergoing that transition,” Laguarta told financial analysts. “Obviously, we stand by the science, the products are very safe and there's nothing to worry about. But we understand that there's going to be probably a consumer demand for more natural ingredients, and we're going to be accelerating that transition.

“Ideally, we can do this in a very pragmatic orchestrated way as an industry and not create unnecessary panic or chaos,” he added. “In the next couple of years, we'll have migrated all the portfolio into natural colors or at least provide the consumer with natural color options. And, obviously, every consumer will have the opportunity to choose what they prefer.”

Danone told Reuters news service it’s working to determine how it can remove artificial colorants from its U.S. portfolio, which includes the Yo Crunch and Light & Fit brands, said Shane Grant, CEO of the company's Americas business.

"We're working across our supplier base to determine the best path," he said, adding that none of Danone's products sold in U.S. schools uses synthetic colors.

Roughly 2% of the company's products use artificial dyes, according to Grant. The company’s Light & Fit Greek key lime pie yogurt has Blue 1. Yo Crunch yogurt with M&Ms has Blue 1, Blue 1 Lake, Blue 2, Blue 2 Lake, Red 40, Red 40 Lake, Yellow 5, Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 6 and Yellow 6 Lake, according to its ingredient list, all apparently because of the M&Ms.

TreeHouse Foods has been working on it for a while. In the company’s first-quarter financial report, CEO Steve Oakland said, “In respect to public policy changes regarding food ingredients, we’ve been working on reformulation for some time and in some cases are already meeting the future standards. We do applaud the efforts of the FDA to establish one national standard” instead of different ones in various states.

“None of the products Tyson Foods offers through our school nutrition programs include petroleum-based synthetic dyes as ingredients,” CEO Donnie King said during the company’s second quarter earnings call on May 5. “Today, the vast majority of our Tyson branded products -- including our Tyson Dino Nuggets, Tyson Chicken Nuggets, Tyson Chicken Bites and Jimmy Dean Maple Griddle Cakes -- do not contain any of these types of dyes.

“And we have been proactively reformulating those few products that do,” he continued. “We expect [the elimination] of the petroleum-based synthetic dyes in production will be completed by the end of May, much sooner than the timeline provided by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.”

The removal of dyes may be easier for small processors. Stella's Homemade Ice Cream, a shop that makes store-made ice cream in Murrells Inlet, S.C., is phasing out synthetic food dyes, although not entirely because of last month’s HHS/FDA press conference.

"When we first opened Stella's Homemade Ice Cream, my niece was a few months old and my sister was trying to keep dyes out of her diet," Haley King, owner of Stella's, told the local Fox News affiliate. "We learned from her and started doing our research then about dyes in our diets.

"Most of our flavors — around 150 out of our 200 flavors — are dye-free," King said. Now they are working to get all their ice creams free of the dyes earmarked by HHS/FDA.