Where did the idea of blue raspberry come from? Why is it such a common flavor in the US?
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Artificial flavor and color. Marketing uses the term “blue raspberry” to let people know that the item they’re consuming will be raspberry-flavored and have a blue color, presumably to differentiate it from other red berry flavors like strawberry and cherry.
Artificial colors serve both an aesthetic but also practical purpose: to help people figure out what they are looking at with a glance.
The story starts when people wanted to make a raspberry flavored water-ice. Sounds great, right? And because raspberries are red, the water-ice should be red, right?
Well, unfortunately red was already a widely used color with strawberry, cherry, and watermelon so throwing in another red would make it hard to distinguish.
So they decided to turn raspberry flavored water-ice blue, which was not a highly contested color. And to make it interesting and clear they called it “blue-raspberry”. Over the years people have taken more and more liberties with blue-raspberry and added other flavors to it beyond just raspberry. Thats why it tastes so different from raspberry.
Red is used for lots of other flavors, raspberry is late to this game, and blue is a newly available food color that isn’t associated with much else.
Isn’t it made with castoreum, the chemical from a beaver’s anal glands? That’s what I heard
MatPat does a great theory video on this.
All I know is if you set out a bowl of Jolly Ranchers in the office (remember offices? lol) it would eventually contain only blue raspberry candies.
Who did it first? Wouldn’t it be obvious why it exists if we knew for what?
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