>>7492108A commonly repeated justification is that there are actually blue raspberries in real life. They're better known as white bark raspberries, and can ripen into a deep bluish purple. But it's a shade that's far from the electric blue of the FD&C Blue No. 1. As Woods noted, the bright blue happened to nicely match the red-and-blue color scheme of the ICEE logo, but that doesn't explain why other companies would decide to go blue too.
So we asked Nadia Berenstein, a University of Pennsylvania food historian who specializes in the history of synthetic flavors. Berenstein took us back to 1922 and the writings of influential American chemist Melvin De Groote, who was among the first to study the effect of colors on flavor—he proved, for example, that most people couldn't identify a soda as grape-flavored unless it was colored purple. (Remember, you're actually tasting more "pineapple" and "banana" than raspberry in an artificially raspberry-flavored product.) On a visit to a circus, De Groote noticed that the lemonades that were colored naturally—that is, yellow or essentially colorless—might or might not sell well, but that pink lemonades—a color that no lemonade should ever naturally be—consistently sold out, and largely to children. Children are innately drawn to vivid colors, De Groote realized. "There's an appeal that really bright colors have, even when they're unnaturally colored, and especially for young children," Berenstein says. It seems like a no-brainer now, but back in the early part of the 20th century, De Groote was essentially writing the playbook for food chemists.
Berenstein calls blue the "final frontier" for food coloring—it may have simply been a matter of what flavor got to claim it. Raspberry just happened to be that "lucky" fruit.
