Ditching artificial food coloring

For many years, the vibrant yellow of Kraft Heinz’s iconic macaroni and cheese came from the artificial food colorings yellow no. 5 and yellow no. 6. In 2012, the company started searching for a natural replacement.It was an enormous technical challenge. To color the cheese powder in each packet, Kraft needed a natural yellow that would stain the macaroni like the synthetics do. But most natural sources of yellow, such as turmeric and annatto, are fat soluble, meaning they tend to stick to the fatty cheese sauce rather than the just-boiled noodles.“They would have just slid off with the sauce,” says Susan Frecker, a veteran food scientist at the natural-color firm Oterra. “It has to all happen right when the packet hits the product.”To solve the problem, Kraft turned to the Danish firm Chr. Hansen, which had spun off Oterra as an independent business in 2021. Improving staining required forms of natural yellows that were more water soluble. Kraft also had to get the ratios right. Annatto provides a vibrant yellow color, but a formulation with lots of annatto adds an off taste. Mixing in more paprika and turmeric masks that flavor.Perfecting the formula took years, but eventually a combination of annatto, turmeric, and paprika worked. Kraft quietly rolled out the new formula in late 2015 and still uses the natural colors today.Kraft’s mac-and-cheese switch came amid a wave of consumer concern about negative health effects from synthetic food colorings, which prompted commitments to ditch the colors by food companies,