Thanks, but why does it need to take so long? More importantly, why would ice cream need fake color? What flavor would warrant that?

The story also links to three other big food manufacturers who are phasing out these dyes... over multi-year periods.

It takes a while to experiment, find what replacement works best and how much of it to use, and then set up new supply chains for it.

As for what flavor would warrant dyes? Off the top of my head: Mint, peppermint, strawberry, orange sherbert, blue moon... I'm sure there's more.

Ben & Jerry’s mint ice cream is white and tastes just fine.

In fact, I've always felt that white mint chocolate chip was more premium, but it's definitely gone out of style a bit. I also believe it tasted slightly different - at least the bryers, it was maybe more of a spearmint?

The question was about "need" and no flavor "needs" dye.

To top it off, the issue isn’t dyes, it’s artificial dyes. You can still dye your mint ice cream green, it will just be a slightly lighter shade of green.

You can get dark natural

Cynic in me says: "wait as long as possible and hope that the next administration doesn't care." I think there was a similar event recently with Apple vowing to make a big investment in US factory infrastructure or something, but the projected date was 2028.

Maybe not ice-cream, but with other frozen products I could see that selling to kids is more effective when there is bright identifiable colours involved.

Kids don't have money. You aren't selling it to them.

I see you're not from the midwest/Michigan.

Superman flavor is the answer.

> why does it need to take so long?

So they can wait for US regime change and not do it

I'm a sucker for Sloan's "Circus" ice cream flavor. It tastes like cotton candy, is mixed together with gummy bears, and is a very unnatural blue color: https://www.goldbelly.com/restaurants/sloans-ice-cream/circu...

At Coldstone, there's some flavor (I forget the name) that I call "Cherenkov". I mean, it's a bit lighter of a blue, but... that's not a normal color for ice cream.

Why not just not use dyes? I'd be happy to eat weirdly-colored ice cream, whose color is just determined by the most essential ingredients.

I actually reflexively prefer mint ice cream that's slightly off white to dark green now and I think that's because some of the higher quality brands don't use dye so I associate it with them.