An Ottawa graphic designer has revealed the secret behind his Internet sensation of coloured bacon.

Bacon. Grocery store food colouring. Water. And time.

Neil Caldwell marinates strips of regular supermarket bacon in baths of yellow, red, green and purple dye for from 24 to 30 hours. Then he fries the strips and – voila – red, orange, yellow, blue and purple bacon.

Why doesn’t the colour leach out?

“I have no idea,” Caldwell tells the Star, barely able to stop laughing long enough to talk.

“A bit of colour does come out. The hue difference between the fat and the meat is quite noticeable.”

Otherwise, he’s baffled. He’s a 38-year-old graphic designer who had a vision of coloured bacon one Sunday morning in a supermarket, slightly hung over, when a blue baby stroller crossed his line of vision in front of the bacon counter.

The secret could be in the marinating, he admits. But he’s never soaked the bacon in the dye for less than 24 hours, so he’s not sure. He does know that refridgeration seems to make no difference to the final result.

“Visually, it has a bit of a twist,” says Caldwell, explaining the appeal from a designer’s point of view. “The colours are associated with produce: lemons, blueberries, oranges. But when you eat it, you get the earthy taste of bacon.”

Caldwell’s creation, posted on a graphic design forum, caught the eye of bacontoday.com and from there, the world. So far, he’d declined to reveal how it’s done, even when the BBC asked him to fly them some marinating bacon for a test.

Why destroy the mystique now? “I don’t want to dedicate my life to producing coloured bacon.”

But first, he created red and blue bacon with white chocolate on a stick for his American friends. Now he’s had enough.