Why are apple flavoured or apple associated lollies and candies usually green instead of red?
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Probably a couple reasons… there are already so many red flavors with strawberry, cherry, etc. and fewer green ones. Also, apple candy tends to be more toward the tart flavor profile and green apples tend to be green.
There are already many red sweets and they’re all berry flavours, so to distinguish from those flavours, apple is put as green.
We associate red with sweetness and green with tartness in sweets due to this being how they are wrapped and coloured by confectionary companies. Apple flavoured sweets are more often made with sourness, so making them red like berry sweets would not follow the colour trend.
We do actually take into consideration the colour of food as part of our tasting process. So having a berry sweet be red makes it more sweet due to our colour associations compared to a green berry sweet. It’s like a psychological positive reinforcement loop.
We will be primed for better sourness sensitivity when eating a green sweet. That makes a green sour apple sweets more satisfying than red ones.
There are green apples. These are generally more sour than red apples and were more commonly referred to as “cooking” and ” eating” apples, respectively.
The way flavours for sweets are developed is usually by just throwing chemicals together that you know are safe to eat and seeing what they taste like.
The flavour was more than likely designated as “green apple” due to the general sour sweetness which is generally what you taste eating a green apple
I would assume it’s because most are flavored after granny Smith apples so they can get that sour flavor. Combined with the fact there are already so many “red” flavors. (“cherry, strawberry etc) likely the same reason you always see”blue raspberry” even though raspberries aren’t blue.
The flavor tends to be trying to imitate the tart, green apples rather than the sweeter red varieties.
One theory is that it’s the flavor of Blue Raspberries, a variety found out west in the US. Of course, most people haven’t tried it, it tastes nothing like the blue-raspberry flavoring, and the color is more purple than blue. This more likely an after the fact justification.
Around the time the blue raspberry flavor was invented (it’s just a bunch of flavor esters, no relation to actual raspberries) some studies had come out linking certain red flavors that had been used in raspberry flavoring to cancer and other diseases. The easy marketing solution was to swap out the newly invented blue dye.
This meshed well with one of the biggest manufacturers – ICEE – since it has the color in it’s logo. Additionally, lots of marketing research shows kids (primary consumers of these heavy dye products) are drawn to vivid colors. Sort of, the more unnatural, the better. The vivid colors also help with psychologically linking a sort of ambiguous flavor (remember, it’s rather unnatural) to a specific color. In many studies people can’t identify grape soda if it’s not purple. Blue Raspberry has a similar fate.
The thing is, this all happened almost 100 years ago by several companies at the same time that took great liberties with the history for marketing reasons – so we won’t ever know what really happened. All we do know is it works as a marketing ploy, so it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Humans associate color and flavor, useful if you need to know if something might taste good or not. Green apples are a little sour while red apples are more mild. Apple flavored candy is always of the slightly sour or tart flavor, so they make them green. If they made them red it could be off putting as the flavor doesn’t match what you expect from the color.
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