The last bite: More food companies say they’ll take out synthetic dyes

Welcome to “the last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news, tips and which artificial color you’ll miss the most when they’re gone.

General Mills just missed being the first big food company to announce it’s moving on from synthetic food dyes over the next several years. The Golden Valley-based Lucky Charms maker made its move right after Kraft Heinz announced it’s looking for new ways to color Jell-O and Kool-Aid last week.

Now several other food manufacturers are falling in line, including Chicago-based Conagra and the world’s largest food company, Nestlé.

“Consumers enjoy a wide variety of foods and beverages as part of their daily diet,” said Marty Thompson, CEO of Nestlé USA, in a news release. “As their diverse dietary preferences and nutritional needs evolve, we evolve with them.”

Conagra, which owns brands like Healthy Choice and Slim Jim, also pointed to “evolving consumer trends” for getting synthetic food coloring out of their foods by the end of 2027.

The bigger issue, however, is complying with a California law banning foods that use artificial coloring from being sold in schools, and a West Virginia law that outlaws them completely starting in 2028.

Texas also recently passed a law requiring food companies to apply a warning label if they use any of 44 ingredients that other countries have not approved, including artificial food colors.

While the Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. say they want to end the use of artificial colors, there is no legal framework compelling companies to stop using them at the federal level. But companies have found there’s an economic case for creating their own national standard to deal with a patchwork of state laws.

“There’s strong potential, I would say, to create consumer confusion, because if something’s safe in one state or not another state, how is that going to work?” General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening said in an interview last week. “Also, our logistics networks aren’t set up for that.”

When shoppers scan food labels, where are they looking? The expiration date, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey.

More than 90% of consumers say they regularly look at the expiration date when weighing purchases. The nutrition facts label garners 79% of shoppers, while 71% will look at ingredients.

Toward the bottom of the list is health claims, usually printed on the front of the package. About 59% of shoppers say they regularly consider them. Consider this fuel for the “clean label” trend as savvy consumers routinely look past claims right to the ingredients list.

When Minnesota-based Pure Prairie Poultry abruptly shuttered and declared bankruptcy last fall, millions of chickens went unfed.

Activist groups Animal Partisan and the Humane Farming Association say that amounted to animal cruelty, and they are seeking criminal charges and a $300,000 penalty over the nearly half-million birds affected in Wisconsin.

In the poultry business, companies typically own the birds and contract with growers, with agreements to provide feed throughout their lifecycle.

More than a million birds were euthanized in Iowa as a result of the lapse in feed deliveries when Pure Prairie could no longer pay feed mills. More than half a million birds were stranded in Wisconsin, some reportedly starving to death. About half the 300,000 birds affected in Minnesota were euthanized, while the others found new homes.

Artificial intelligence is reaching every corner of the economy. The International Foodservice Distributors Association announced a new AI tool, Knowelle, that helps distributors “quickly find industry-specific information without having to search through multiple publications manually,” the association announced this week.

It’s not exactly a niche use case, since the ability of restaurants, schools and hospitals to get food orders on time and in full (and at good prices) depends on distributors, who now get to flex a ChatGPT-like tool that only searches industry-specific knowledge.

“Our goal in developing Knowelle is to improve access to valuable IFDA insights, including our industry-leading benchmarking survey data, which will support IFDA members as they make key business decisions,” IFDA CEO Mark Allen said in a statement.

An agricultural funding bill out of the U.S. House would cut discretionary spending by 4%, or $1.2 billion, in the next fiscal year that starts in October. Millions in cuts would come from the Agricultural Marketing Service, Farm Service Agency, research, conservation programs, rural housing and the elimination of rural energy programs.

House Republicans say the bill is “fiscally responsible and refocuses programs on their core mission while putting the health, safety and prosperity of American producers and consumers first.”

Democrats said it “hurts farmers by cutting the support system that helps them access government resources they are promised.”