Companies know to go with the political flow. It is better to help manage the process than protest just because a populist belief defies science and end up with mandates handed down by Congress that could be far worse. When activists manufactured concern about BPA, for example, ConAgra and others spent no time (though we did) noting that "endocrine disruptor" was as meaningless as "processed" or "natural" or that BPA binds to estrogen 1/20,000th as well as birth control pills that women have taken safely for generations. They just replaced BPA. BPS raised the cost a little, sales certainly did not go up to offset the higher prices because the people 'boycotting' never bought Manwich in the first place, but food mullahs couldn't pivot to the new product that replaced the one they insisted the company had to replace.
So when Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and longtime Democratic party insider Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. flipped to the Republican party and became Secretary of Health and Human Services, everyone from agriculture to cellphones to vaccines braced for an onslaught.
When he targeted food coloring, companies did not protest that his positions were in defiance of science. That wouldn't have worked, he hates science, so they offered a gradual phasing out. By doing that, he gets to declare a win for the anti-chemical evangelists who changed to the Republican side with him and companies get time to replace it. Or maybe just run out the clock the way career government employees do whenever a Republican administration creates a policy they don't want.
One new effort leveraging Secretary Kennedy's war on science could benefit corn farmers. Researchers from the University of Missouri and USDA recently published a study of purple corn grown in South America and its utility in food coloring. If it is viable, the kooky cult gets to mumble stuff about antioxidants while people with less money still have affordable food.
Image: University of Missouri
They will have to solve the stability problem. Like with hydrogen cars, social media pundits can look at an ideal lab condition and say the only thing missing is 'political will' but sometimes, like with solar, politicians believe it and taxpayers are stuck with throwing good money after bad propping up a gimmick that has changed conventional energy share by 0.2%. Poor people already beset by higher conventional energy costs to pay for solar and wind don't need more penalties for gimmicks. Red Dye No. 40 and No. 3 were invented to have something that works so a food coloring that breaks down if it's not in a Goldilocks condition is useless in the real world. .
It can't be a snowflake solution that breaks down if it sees daylight, air, or heat.
And it needs to maintain the proper color. Urban dwellers don't want to see gray meat and grape soda. For the study, scientists coated South American corn anthocyanins with maltodextrin from plant starches which, for now, is still considered food-grade and exempt from special approval due to GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status and they found color retention went up to 97 percent from the natural state. They also studied their coating in drinks, which are more acidic along with not being transported in ideal conditions and the color stability also improved.
The remaining challenge to getting purple corn in the midwest is that it doesn't grow well there, which will mean even more science. Efforts like the genetic engineering that activists oppose.
Citation: Ahmad Ali, Sumit Singh Sheoran, Caixia Wan, Pavel Somavat, Ravinder Kumar, Fangfang Li, Ruojie Zhang, Mengshi Lin, Pavel Somavat, Sherry Flint-Garcia, Thermal and storage degradation kinetics of corn anthocyanin-based natural red colorants in a model beverage system, and their gastrointestinal behavior. npj Sci Food 10, 226 (2026). DOI:10.1038/s41538-026-00881-w
