M&M’s maker Mars plans to release a version of its iconic candy without artificial dyes starting in August, the company said, marking a major shift under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign. The initial rollout will omit two classic colors — brown and blue — because replicating them with natural ingredients at scale has proven technically challenging and expensive.
The naturally colored M&M’s will be sold only on Amazon.com, and the company said the original artificially dyed candies will remain on store shelves for now. Anton Vincent, who leads Mars’s North American snacks business, said the company is aiming to offer naturally colored M&M’s in all six classic colors by 2028.
Mars’s push to remove artificial dyes follows years of pressure from Kennedy and state regulators. Last July, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into Mars for alleged deceptive trade practices tied to artificial dyes. A week later, Mars made its new pledge to remove the dyes, which the company said was already in the works when the investigation was announced. The company had previously pledged in 2016 to cut artificial dyes from all of its human food but later changed course for candy, saying many consumers were not worried about the dyes in those products.
The reformulation effort has proven vastly more complicated than the company anticipated, Mars executives told The Wall Street Journal. The biggest obstacle is blue. Mars chose spirulina — the high-protein ingredient often marketed as a superfood — as a natural substitute for Blue 1. But spirulina, an organism that some affiliates call “pond scum,” has gummed up the spray nozzles in Mars’s factories, resulting in spotty, unevenly colored candy. It also leaves a sticky film akin to dental plaque inside factory pipes, creating a food-safety hazard.
To handle spirulina, Mars must upgrade more than 300 machines across its M&M’s plants — installing new mixing tanks, paddles and motors, and adding cleaning equipment that can blast the lines with hotter water and more force. Claire Hewitt, a Mars veteran who has dubbed herself the company’s “chief color officer” overseeing the multimillion-dollar initiative, said: “It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my career.”
About 100 employees across Mars’s offices and plants in New Jersey, Tennessee and Kansas are working on the natural-color effort, with a quarter of them dedicated solely to blue. The company produces about 600 million M&M’s each day at its U.S. factories.
Nature produces few truly blue plants and minerals, making blue “the holy grail of natural food dyes,” said Paul Manning, chief executive of dye manufacturer Sensient Technologies. Mars’s researchers found that to match the “cerulean” hue of artificially colored blue M&M’s, they need to use about seven times more spirulina than a synthetic dye. Even then, the naturally blue M&M’s are lighter, resembling a robin’s egg.
Brown M&M’s also proved elusive because they contain a fair amount of blue. Green, however, yielded a win after months of trials — those M&M’s also require spirulina, but not nearly as much.
Mars considered launching a three-color mix with red, orange and yellow, but executives said the “sunset vibes” were too strong. Four colors were better, but purple required too much spirulina and pink lacked “pop,” according to Mars. The company ultimately chose red, orange, yellow and green for the initial debut.
Mars’s deliberations over the color mix reached the company’s board, where directors including members of the Mars family — the private, billionaire clan that owns the company — questioned executives about discussions with consumers and retailers. “It was a daunting situation,” Vincent said. “You’re messing with an 85-year-old icon.”
M&M’s launched in 1941 to provide World War II soldiers with chocolate candy that would not melt. Blue entered the lineup in 1995 after 10 million consumers voted for it to replace the tan M&M. New York City’s Empire State Building turned its lights blue to celebrate the color’s arrival.