One day this summer, you may find yourself in your backyard, with blue-tongued little children chasing each other around the pool. They've been eating blue raspberry ice pops, that bizarre not-really-a-flavor that's a lovely shade of antifreeze and tastes like a jug of corn syrup decided to attempt suicide by vitamin C overdose.
When and why did Americans decide to take the world's loveliest fruit, the raspberry, and decide that it deserved to be represented by a bright blue that looks better suited to a prop on a bar in a less imaginative episode of Star Trek?
The story of blue raspberry begins in the 1950s, when there were already questions about the safety of FD&C Red No. 2, otherwise known as amaranth. ("FD&C" stands for the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938; the amaranth we're talking about here was a dye that took its name from the grain but not the grain itself.) In 1957, according to Ai Hisano, a Harvard business historian who specializes in the history of food colorings, research came out that concluded that Red. No. 2 was safe to consume—but it was a report funded by the chemical industry that made food dyes.
Red No. 2 is the darker shade of wine red that was then used for raspberry-flavored products. Or, we should say, what we've come to accept as the artificial flavor that stands in for raspberry. According to Jerry Bowman, executive director of the Flavor & Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States, the flavor profile of raspberry was actually developed using "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety."
All this kerfuffle over Red No. 2 was happening in the midst of new legislation that reflected growing public concerns about what consumers were feeding themselves. In 1958, the Food Additives Amendment passed, dictating that food manufacturers had to prove their food additives were safe. A key section of the amendment said that the FDA had to automatically nix approval for any additive that was shown to cause cancer in humans or animals. In 1960, the Color Additive Amendment came along, requiring the same of colorants for foods, drugs, or cosmetics.
"This was important for these companies, because this was a time when controversy over harmful food additives, including food colorings, became intensified not only within the government but also among public consumers," Hisano says.
The same year that the Food Additives Amendment became law, an April 7 article in a periodical called The Billboard: Outdoor Amusement Directory mentions a "new blue-raspberry flavor for snow cones" promoted by a Cincinnati company called Gold Medal, which to this day sells shaved-ice Sno-Kones and popcorn machines for concession stands and snack vendors. In addition, Gold Medal was going "all out in pushing two new flavors for the floss [cotton candy] operator, grape-purple and blue-raspberry." This 1958 story was the earliest reference to the flavor blue raspberry that we've been able to find so far. Unfortunately, Gold Medal's spokeswoman Heather Gims says there's no one still at the family-run company who can remember anything about how Gold Medal got into the blue raspberry business, but adds that "It continues to be a best-selling flavor for Sno-Kones."
The public worry about food additives was still going strong when blue raspberry first popped up. In either 1970 or 1971, the blue raspberry ICEE took its place alongside red cherry as a signature flavor of the brand. It had an artificial raspberry flavor but was colored by FD&C Blue No. 1. Susan Woods, vice president of marketing of The ICEE Company, says its blue ICEE "paved the way for other blue raspberry-flavored beverages." They may not have invented the stuff, but they helped spread the word.
"Raspberry tasted great as a frozen beverage. However, we wanted something that was a distinctly different color than our flagship flavor, cherry. We came up with blue raspberry," Woods says. "The color of blue raspberry flavor was strongly inspired by the blue color that is part of the ICEE brand."
Not so fast, ICEE. About the same time, Otter Pops—those tubes of frozen sugar water—introduced a new character and flavor, Louie Blue. According to marketing director Laura Trevino of Jel Sert, the company that owns Otter Pops (as well as Fla-Vor-Ice), that was "around 1970"—meaning that both ICEE and Otter Pops have a strong claim to being responsible for taking blue raspberry from its apparent beginnings at circuses, fairs, and concession stands and unleashing it upon the larger consumer world.
In any case, the flavor obviously proved popular: We suck down some 132 million 16-ounce blue raspberry ICEEs every year. And it wasn't to remain relegated to the freezer aisle forever: There are now blue raspberry Twizzlers (introduced in 2009, according to a Hershey's spokeswoman), and blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers (first rolled out in 2011), among other candies.
Why the switch? Common sense suggests that because the field of "red" flavors was already so crowded—cherry, strawberry, watermelon, cinnamon, cranberry, red apple—and there are scarcely any blue foods in nature, raspberry was simply traded from Team Red to Team Blue to avoid confusion among consumers. Woods's explanation confirms that that was definitely part of the thinking. (Unfortunately, Trevino didn't manage to track down any company records explaining the Otter Pops bosses' decision making.) But it isn't the whole story.
It seems highly likely that the downfall of FD&C Red No. 2 played an integral role in birthing blue raspberry. Despite the positive 1957 study, later research continued to link the dye to illnesses, including a 1971 Soviet study that blamed it for cancer. In 1976, in the face of years of growing consumer concerns, the FDA reversed decades of insistence that Red No. 2 was safe and banned it outright, noting that there was significant evidence that the the dye caused tumors in lab rats. (Red No. 2 is still used in the U.K.)
Meanwhile, the FDA had officially declared FD&C Blue No. 1 “permanently listed for food and ingested drug uses” in 1969. A year or so later, Louie Blue and the blue ICEE made their debuts, created with the controversy-free colorant. The people at Gold Medal, ICEE, and Otter Pops had evidently seen the writing on the wall well before the FDA hammer came down on Red No. 2.
But that still leaves one question: Why did they go with such an obnoxious shade of blue, unadulterated Blue No. 1?
A commonly repeated justification is that there are actually blue raspberries in real life. They're better known as white bark raspberries, and can ripen into a deep bluish purple. But it's a shade that's far from the electric blue of the FD&C Blue No. 1. As Woods noted, the bright blue happened to nicely match the red-and-blue color scheme of the ICEE logo, but that doesn't explain why other companies would decide to go blue too.
So we asked Nadia Berenstein, a University of Pennsylvania food historian who specializes in the history of synthetic flavors. Berenstein took us back to 1922 and the writings of influential American chemist Melvin De Groote, who was among the first to study the effect of colors on flavor—he proved, for example, that most people couldn't identify a soda as grape-flavored unless it was colored purple. (Remember, you're actually tasting more "pineapple" and "banana" than raspberry in an artificially raspberry-flavored product.) On a visit to a circus, De Groote noticed that the lemonades that were colored naturally—that is, yellow or essentially colorless—might or might not sell well, but that pink lemonades—a color that no lemonade should ever naturally be—consistently sold out, and largely to children. Children are innately drawn to vivid colors, De Groote realized. "There's an appeal that really bright colors have, even when they're unnaturally colored, and especially for young children," Berenstein says. It seems like a no-brainer now, but back in the early part of the 20th century, De Groote was essentially writing the playbook for food chemists.
Berenstein calls blue the "final frontier" for food coloring—it may have simply been a matter of what flavor got to claim it. Raspberry just happened to be that "lucky" fruit.
Does this unnatural combination of blinding neon blue and toothaching sweetness—which was designed to attract undiscriminating children like flies, and whose best trait is that doesn't cause cancer in lab rats—deserve the scorn we discriminating adults heap upon it? Nope, Berenstein says: "Don't compare it to something that grows out of the ground. Don't ask the question whether blue raspberry tastes like real raspberries. That's beside the point. When we're eating a blue-raspberry-flavored lollipop or Jolly Rancher or disgusting tube of frozen junk, just enjoy the experience for what it is."