What’s a Blue Raspberry?

Believe it or not, it’s a real fruit, not a lab creation. Well, sort of.

In response to the horrific conditions of food processing plants exposed in books like Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle, the federal government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It allowed only seven food dyes to be used by American food makers, including FD&C Orange No. 1. No harm was reported until the early 1950s, when it was discovered that a handful of children had gotten sick after eating foods that contained the dye. Orange 1 was banned by the FDA in 1956, leading the FDA to thoroughly retest food dyes and additives. One of the dyes tested was FD&C Red No. 2, which the agency recognized as safe, although only provisionally.

But there were reports of that dye, made from coal tar or petroleum byproducts, leading to seizures or, according to a 1971 study in the Soviet Union, cancer. It was still very widely used, with a million pounds of the dye used each year in the U.S. by 1976…the year the FDA banned it as a carcinogen.

The removal of that particular dye from commercial use caused havoc for ice-pop manufacturers. What are ice-pops? They’re those popsicle-like treats packaged in thin plastic tubes that are sold as liquid and customers are to freeze themselves. Ice pops—brands like Fla-Vor-Ice and Otter Pops—are a mixture of water, sugar, artificial flavor, and dyes.

Different red dyes were used to indicate flavor—orange for orange, and green for lime, for example. It was trickier with red fruits. A box of Otter Pops contained cherry, strawberry, watermelon, and raspberry treats, all requiring a different shade of red. Manufacturers ultimately decided to make cherry a dark red, strawberry a light red, watermelon a light pink, and raspberry a very dark red. But the dye used for raspberry-flavored food items at the time? The banned Red No. 2.

Food processors didn’t know what to do—it wasn’t worth it making yet another shade of red for an already crowded field of red products. That’s when some food scientists discovered blue raspberry. Yes, it’s a real flavor. Scientists took the flavor from the Whitebark Raspberry, which bears a blackish-bluish fruit, with a rarely used blue food dye called FD&C Blue No. 1.

“Blue raspberry” was born. Today, it’s a food industry standard. You can find “blue raspberry” flavors of everything from Jolly Ranchers to yogurt to bubble bum to Gatorade.

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