Why are apple flavoured or apple associated lollies and candies usually green instead of red?
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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.
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