Scientists Found a New Natural Blue Food Coloring from an Unlikely Source

From candies and cakes to even the pills we take, natural food coloring is big business. The overall market could be worth up to $3.2 billion by 2027, which is a whole lot of money for a bunch of colors derived from fruits and vegetables. And the biggest development that has people buzzing is a new type of blue that just might make it easier to get that particular pigment from a natural source.

Recently, a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis have discovered a new way to source a brilliant new shade of cyan blue from a natural source. And rather ironically, that natural source is red cabbage.

Believe it or not, there's a tiny bit of blue pigment (aka blue anthocyanins) in a red cabbage. But in this case, the team at UC Davis found a way to use enzymes that can convert the many non-blue anthocyanins in red enzymes to that blue color, naturally. With more newly-blue anthocyanins that can be extracted, it's suddenly a much more commercially viable proposition to use red cabbage as a source of natural blue food coloring.

While this may not seem like a big deal to those of us who take the color of our food and where it comes from for granted, it's potentially consequential news for the industry. You see, there aren't really many natural sources of cyan like this, leading to a widespread reliance on the artificial FD&C Blue No. 1 dye. While the FDA considers this particular artificial dye safe, scientific studies have tried to determine if there's a link between ADHD and Blue No. 1. So, suffice to say, a naturally-derived replacement could be useful.

According to Forbes, two of the researchers who made the discovery have launched a startup to "explore commercial applications for this new source of cyan." They also got some help from the Mars Advanced Research Institute and Mars Wrigley Science and Technology, so it sounds like some pretty big food brands have a vested interest in their efforts.

So if you'd rather sidestep Blue No.1 in the future, this breakthrough is big news. Thanks for the blue, red cabbage.