Welch’s Fruit Snacks Get a MAHA-Friendly Makeover

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1:29Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News.

1:35Will Kubzansky:The other day, our producer, Julia Press, pulled me into the studio with a sweeter-than-usual assignment. I have treats brought back from my tour of the Welch's Fruit Snacks Factory. I brought two types of fruit snacks for you to try. This old type that they're phasing out and the new type that they're rolling out. And there's one key difference. The old type included a little bit of artificial dyes added in for color. The new type only gets their dyes from natural sources, fruits and vegetables. This switch has been a long time in the making. Welch's has been on a decade-long odyssey to swap out artificial flavors for natural ones.

2:19Will Kubzansky:But it's now something the Trump administration wants all companies to do, as part of its crusade to, quote, make America healthy again. Okay, dump them out. How do they look to you? So they look exactly the same. You think? Okay, let's do a side-by-side comparison. Let's start with raspberry. All right. Old kind, a little more clear, a little more vibrant. New kind, firmer, skinnier, and a little more muted. But only slightly. They do look pretty much identical. They look pretty much identical. Okay, let's do a taste test. Close your eyes. Number one. I'm really getting taken back to middle school here.

3:03Will Kubzansky:You look blissed out. It tastes so good. Okay, number two. Spoiler alert, I couldn't tell the difference. Well, I just had two delicious fruit snacks that tasted exactly the same. Really? If you had to guess. Was the first one the old kind and the second one the new kind? No. Oh, the opposite. Making a near replica of this popular product was time-consuming, costly, and complicated. And as other companies try to pull this off, Welch's case study could reveal a lot about the challenges that lie ahead for the American food industry. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News.

3:44Will Kubzansky:Today on the show, as the Trump administration's Maha movement encourages more and more food and drink companies to rework their formulas, we visit one company that's done it to see what it takes.

4:03Will Kubzansky:What's the first thing you think of when you think of Welch's fruit snacks? I think of vending machines like soccer practice where you're deciding how you're going to spend your$2.50 that you've scrounged up. Yes, they were in my middle school vending machine too. Yeah, yeah. And we would get them during lunch and kind of swap colors and things like that. Yeah, personally avoiding the orange ones. That's Bloomberg reporter Will Kubzanski. He recently went with our producer, Julia, to tour a Welch's fruit snacks production plant in New Jersey. Because they have begun rolling out products without any synthetic food dyes.

4:39So that's, you know, Red 40, Blue No. 1. And, you know, they had just started making this transition on its flagship product, the mixed fruit variety.

4:49Will Kubzansky:Food dyes are in the headlines a lot these days. Four years from now, we're going to have most of these products off the market, or you will know about them when you... They've been thrust into the spotlight by Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We have them on the run now, and we are going to win this battle. That battle he's talking about is the war on ultra-processed foods. Specifically, the artificial dyes that are often in those ultra-processed foods, like petroleum-based Red 40. So far, it's been more of a pressure campaign than an all-out war. The FDA hasn't banned these dyes outright.

5:29Will Kubzansky:But RFK has encouraged companies to drop them by the end of next year. There's lots of other things he cares about. Seed oils, he talks a lot about ultra-processed foods. Synthetic dyes, though, are the area where we've seen the most change, the fastest, and the most response from companies that are subject to his regulations. What does the research say? What kind of health effects do synthetic dyes and artificial dyes actually have on consumers? So there's no like slam dunk piece of evidence that sort of says one way or the other, synthetic food dyes are really good or really bad. The FDA considers them safe.

6:04And the FDA has not revoked the regulation authorizing the use of synthetic food dyes. If you want to, you could still put Red 40 in your product right now. There's some state laws you'd have to navigate. In the late 2000s, there is a UK study that showed that there is some association with hyperactivity in children from synthetic dyes. In 2010, the EU said we're going to put a warning label on anything that has a synthetic food dye in it. In 2011, the US FDA did a similar review. They said, we don't see any causal effect between adverse behaviors and food dyes. We don't see the need to put a warning label on, although that was like a little more closely contested.

6:44About a decade later, California reviewed the evidence and said, actually, we do think there's a link. And that evidence sort of got passed along the chain. And a couple of years later, Gavin Newsom signed a bill that prohibits the use of synthetic food dyes in schools beginning in 2028.

7:00Will Kubzansky:About a fifth of products on American grocery store shelves contain synthetic food dyes in 2020. That's according to a study published by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics this year. That number's probably gone down since 2020 because companies have, like, sort of started to sense where the wind is blowing and they've been trying to get rid of them in their new products. But where they found them most often, sugary beverages, sugary treats, things often marketed at kids. You can do the math, right? If something looks good, if something looks bright and exciting and colorful, you're going to be more likely to want to eat it, especially if you're like, you know, a six-year-old at the Walmart with your dad looking at the cereal aisle.

7:37Will Kubzansky:That brings us back to Welch's. Since 2001, a company called Pym Brands has been making these fruit snacks and licensing the Welch name from the juice and jelly maker. Historically, the company's formula contains some artificial dyes, in addition to the natural color that comes from the fruit purees inside. But in 2015, it started experimenting with reducing its dependency on synthetic dyes. And last month, it announced they'd be fully phased out of all its fruit snack products by early 2026. We are outside the Pem Brands factory in Somerset, New Jersey, where they make Welch's fruit snacks. We have nearly a million square feet dedicated to manufacturing, packaging, and distributing Welch's fruit snacks, which go across North America.

8:27Actually, from this facility, we also...

8:29Will Kubzansky:That's Michael Rosenberg, Pim Brand's CEO, who showed Will and Julia around. It felt closer to, like, the Model T production line than it did Willy Wonka. It's one of these office parks that's sort of like, you wouldn't know it exists unless you had a reason to go to it. And you walk into this factory. It just sort of smells like warm fruit. It smells like a fruit snack in here. Is it like a pie, like a fruit pie? Like, I'm trying to figure out what this reminds me of. Well, so because of the number of fruits in our product, you don't smell any particular fruit. You just get this incredibly fruit-smelling aroma.

9:07Just like a remarkable amount of movement in the factory, I found the fruit snacks themselves are going into the molds. They're being shaken out. They're being transported across the factory in like a conveyor belt set up. You know, massive facility people, you know, wearing their safety equipment, fruit snacks going on all kinds of conveyor belts and up little fruit snack elevators and machines doling out packages and pouches. How much, generally speaking, does it cost to build a facility like this? Each production line costs between$15 and$20 million. We have six production lines. And then, of course, you have all the packaging part.

9:45So there's a fortune in this building.

9:49Will Kubzansky:The factory can churn out over 10 billion pouches of fruit snacks a year. Will and Julia sat down with the team responsible for Welch's fruit snacks pivot to natural dyes. And they told them it's been a long road. So this process, according to them, started in 2015, so a decade ago. their chief officer of R &D, she, one, noticed the products are made with real fruit. So, you know, part of the Welch's fruit snacks, like the shtick is, you know, a strawberry fruit snack is made with real strawberry puree. So there's already a little color from those fruits in there. It inherently comes with some natural color.

10:27And we were adding so minuscule amounts. So I was thinking if we can reduce that, why not?

10:35Will Kubzansky:Bhavna Romani, that R &D director, also noticed that synthetic dyes were starting to lose favor internationally. So Bhavna and her team started tinkering. They took it one color at a time. First up, yellow, the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. She said yellow was easier to swap out because there are lots of natural sources of the color and enough supply of those substitutes in the market. They replaced some with turmeric and annatto, and it was a relatively easy switch. Kraft mac and cheese made a very similar switch around that time. Annato is a yellow coloring made from a tree seat. But other colors were harder to match.

11:17Will Kubzansky:Here's Bhavna. Unfortunately, there was no true replacement for the blue because there are not too many blue fruits or vegetables because all natural colors are derived from real fruits and vegetables. And in reality, if you go to the supermarket, it's not too many choices to replace that. It's not just can we match the exact shade. It's can this shade last over time? Is the pH imbalance between the dye and the fruit puree that's already in there, is that going to make the fruit snack turn brown over time? For the blue color, they settled on spirulina, a type of algae, and a fruit called huito, found in South and Central America.

11:56Will Kubzansky:Getting a new raspberry gummy to look and taste just like the old gummy, so that unsuspecting eaters like me can't tell the difference, took the R &D team close to 50 different trials. To replace Red 40, they used ingredients like purple carrot and red grape. And once they figured out the right combination of ingredients, they had to find a way to make the colors consistent. Fruit grown in North America versus South America, it has a different taste, different color. They needed to find the suppliers for the natural dyes, work with the suppliers to make sure that when the food dye is transported, like it's not getting any adverse impacts from temperature changes in the supply chain.

12:36They needed to work with them to stabilize the acidity of the food dyes because it was interacting with the fruit that was in their fruit snacks. And like you need to make sure it doesn't just turn brown in like three months, six months, nine months, a year over the course of the full shelf life of the product. You have to do R &D. You have to find the right people. You need to do the testing, things that cost money.

12:56Will Kubzansky:And it comes with risk. Not just financial risk, but the risk of alienating customers. We get into that and how other companies are trying to make similar changes after the break.

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16:35Will Kubzansky:When it comes to swapping out synthetic dyes with natural dyes, Welch's Fruit Snacks was a little earlier to the party. But now, many other companies are starting to follow suit. PepsiCo is the latest company to jump on the Maha bandwagon, announcing plans to remove artificial colors and flavors. Kraft is announcing they will no longer be launching any products that have artificial dye in them. General Mills announcing it will remove artificial colors from its U.S. cereals and K-12 school foods by next summer. A lot of what we've seen so far are commitments to do it. Let's talk about some of those commitments.

17:13Will Kubzansky:How quickly are these companies saying that they'll do this? So the timeline that most companies have given is by the end of 2027, beginning of 2028. That's a specific date because beginning on January 1st, 2028, if you want to sell your product in West Virginia, you can't have synthetic dyes in it. There are similar laws going into effect in the California schools, Texas. The feasibility is another question. Remember, for Welch's, the changeover took a decade. It took a full year just to test that the new colors wouldn't fade over the course of the product's shelf life. But does that mean it will take a decade for everyone else to do it, too?

17:54Will Kubzansky:Maybe not. Welch's, they have a more complex product than, like, a Skittle or a Starburst. There's the fruit in there, vitamins and minerals and things like that. And also, you know, compared to Mars or Hershey or Mondelez or a smaller company, right? No one has explicitly said as much to me, but like, they don't have the same leverage that, you know, a massive multinational might have to secure these food dyes. On the other hand, they've been working on this for 10 years. They've been thinking about it for a long time. The question is matching the shades. Customers, you know, when they open a box of Welch's Fruit Snacks or a box of M &M's or, you know, their cereal, they want to recognize the product that they know.

18:34Will Kubzansky:There's a lot at stake when you start tinkering with a classic recipe. General Mills learned that the hard way when it tried this with Trix cereal back in 2016. And then the American consumer was appalled. The Trix did not look like the Trix that they had grown to love, and they very quickly made the switch back. Ten years later, the American consumer might be more comfortable with this kind of change. And if they aren't already, they could just get used to it. I talked with someone who runs one of these natural dye companies, and something funny he said was, Europeans, when they see that bright synthetic red 40 shade, they're like, oh my god, there must be something wrong with it.

19:12It looks like it was made in a chemical plant.

19:15Will Kubzansky:There are other reasons a larger corporation could have an easier time than Pym did. Those companies may operate in countries where they're already asked to put warning labels on dyed products or where they're not allowed to use synthetic dyes. So they may have a head start on the replacement process. How much of the motivation of these companies to rework these formulas is part of kind of making the current administration happy versus these broader global forces? That's a good question. in, putting aside RFK, Maha and sort of the cultural vein it tapped into, like there are people who are interested in this.

19:53There are people who don't want their kids to consume synthetic dyes. What I would say is that RFK is making a lot of other asks, right? There are seed oils, which are, you know, canola, sunflower seed oil, things like that. He wants those removed from the food supply. He would like things to the effect of limits on how much sugar we consume and the ultra-processed foods we consume. I can't read the mind of these CEOs and the folks who are doing their public affairs, but objectively, changing one or two ingredients where there's an existing replacement and, in fact, it's already used internationally feels like a lighter lift than making these more fundamental changes to how you fry your product, how you consider your product processed or ultra-processed, the amount of sugar in there.

20:37Will Kubzansky:Right. Well, that brings us to sort of a broader final question, which is that the stated goal of these changes per RFK is to make Americans healthier. Is there a significant health benefit here, or are these mostly aesthetic changes that are easier to achieve? It's a question I don't have a complete answer to. There is some discourse on this because RFK took something of a victory lap when Kellogg's cut its synthetic food dyes. Anytime a company cuts its synthetic food dyes, he'll put out a tweet and he'll say it's a Maha win. And the Kellogg's one got picked up. And it kind of sparked this broader, you know, conversation about, you know, if you're eating the French fries, but they're made with beef tallow instead of being fried to seed oil.

21:18And you're having the Froot Loops still and they're still full of sugar, but like they don't have the red 40 in them. The question sort of becomes like how much of an impact is this happening versus like how much is this just sort of Maha being able to take the win? The administration would contend that this is the first change of many to come. They want to fundamentally change the way we eat in this country. they're going to try and make some pretty big changes to the dietary guidelines that are coming out later this summer. The alternative take is the companies saw an easy place to, you know, score some points and we'll see what happens with the rest of the changes.