Mars can replicate four M&M’s colors with natural dye. The fifth one is breaking its factories.
M&M’s will launch a version made without artificial dyes in August, and it will be missing two colors: blue and brown. Mars cracked red, orange, yellow, and green using natural ingredients. Blue, powered by an algae called spirulina, proved too costly and too messy to scale in time.
Picture a factory in Topeka, Kansas, where 600 million M&M’s roll off the line every single day. Now picture a sticky, smoothie-like algae paste foaming up inside the spray nozzles, gumming the pipes, and leaving a film that looks like dental plaque. That is the holdup standing between Mars and a fully natural M&M.
What Happened
In August, M&M’s hits its 85th year with the biggest recipe change in its history: a version with no artificial dyes, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The catch is that two classic colors, blue and brown, will not make the cut. Mars figured out convincing natural versions of red, orange, and yellow using beets and turmeric, and recently nailed green. Blue, which the brand added back in 1995 after 10 million people voted it in over purple and pink, turned out to be the wall. Brown went down with it, because brown M&M’s actually contain a fair bit of blue.
The Backstory
Mars first pledged to cut artificial dyes from its human food back in 2016, then reversed course for candy, arguing that most shoppers were not worried about dyes in their treats. The pressure came back hard. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign leaned on food companies to drop artificial colors, several states passed their own bans, and last July the Texas Attorney General opened an investigation into Mars over alleged deceptive trade practices tied to dyes. A week later, Mars made its fresh pledge, which the company says was already in the works. Food companies, for their part, have defended the dyes by pointing to regulatory approvals.
The Plan
Mars went all in on spirulina, the protein-packed algae sold as a superfood and affectionately nicknamed “pond scum.” Roughly 100 employees across plants in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Kansas are working on natural colors, with a quarter of them assigned to blue alone. Claire Hewitt, the Mars veteran running the multimillion-dollar effort, gave herself a fitting title: “chief color officer.” The team weighed a three-color launch of red, orange, and yellow, but the “sunset vibes were too strong.” Purple ate too much spirulina. Pink had no pop. Green made the cut. So the August lineup ships with four colors instead of six, and Mars is targeting all six naturally dyed colors by 2028.
The Business Model Angle
This is a masterclass in the hidden cost of brand equity. M&M’s color set is not decoration, it is identity. When your product is the icon, every tweak becomes a high-wire act, the same lesson snack brands like Pringles internalized by building recognition on a single saddle-shaped chip. Mars chose to ship an incomplete rainbow rather than wait, betting that moving now beats moving perfectly. The deeper lesson for operators: when regulation or consumer sentiment forces a reformulation, your physical supply chain, not your marketing, is the real bottleneck. Mars has to upgrade more than 300 machines, install new tanks, paddles, and motors, and rebuild its cleaning systems just to handle one ingredient. Reformulation is an operations problem wearing a branding costume.
The Risk
Blue is the “holy grail” of natural food dyes for a reason: nature barely produces the color. Spirulina needs about seven times the colorant to approximate M&M’s signature cerulean, and even then the result lands closer to a robin’s egg than the bold blue fans know. The algae foams, clogs nozzles, and leaves a plaque-like film that can grow mold, a genuine food-safety hazard. Cleaning eats into line efficiency. Then there is the distribution gamble: the natural M&M’s will sell only on Amazon, while the artificially dyed bags stay on shelves everywhere else. Mars is essentially running a contained test, which protects the core business but risks signaling that “natural” is a niche side project rather than the future. If consumers shrug at a paler, partial rainbow sold in one place, the whole multimillion-dollar bet starts to look shaky.
Quick Questions
Why are blue and brown M&M’s being dropped?
Because the natural blue dye, made from spirulina algae, is too expensive and too hard to produce at scale right now. Brown gets cut too, since it contains a fair bit of blue.
When do the new M&M’s come out, and where can I buy them?
August 2026, and at first only on Amazon. The regular artificially dyed bags are staying on store shelves for now.
What is M&M’s using instead of artificial dye?
Natural ingredients like beets and turmeric for red, orange, and yellow, plus spirulina (an algae) for green and, eventually, blue.
Will all the colors come back?
Mars says it is aiming to offer all six naturally dyed colors by 2028. It has not said whether the artificial versions will disappear after that.
The Bottom Line
Mars’s blue problem is every founder’s reformulation nightmare in miniature: the market (or the regulator) demands a change, the brand promise says do not break what people love, and the factory floor quietly decides what is actually possible. Mars picked speed over completeness, shipping four colors now and chasing six later. The takeaway for operators is simple: when you are forced to change an iconic product, sweat the supply chain before the storytelling, and be honest about what you can deliver at scale. A partial win that ships beats a perfect plan that never leaves the lab.
