Why Is All Candy Fruit Flavored?

From Sour Patch Kids to Skittles, almost every candy flavor is fruit, and we don't question it for a second. The first instance of modern candy had medicine like herbal or menthol flavoring, so how did fruit become the universal default for sugar candy? The answer, just like most things, is chemicals and scamming. Candies have existed for thousands of years, but they start looking somewhat familiar in the mid-1800s in the form of medicine, lozenges to be exact. Pharmacists use sugar to mask the bitter taste of remedies like raw quinine or castor oil. The most popular flavors were something similar to what the old man at church gave you. Licorice, peppermint, and if you were lucky, butterscotch. Which I always was conflicted about, right? Butterscotch is odd. This experience won't apply to all of you, but if it does, it's certainly a core memory. Fruit just seems like a natural option, but it couldn't be just yet, because real fruit extracts were expensive, went bad really fast, and lost their flavor during high-heat sugar boiling. For decades, the best candy you could get tasted kind of like a 3 out of 10 cough drop with no numbing effect. But during the late 19th century, the second industrial revolution transformed candy making from a handcrafted trade narrowed to a handful of... rather awful flavors into a high-speed factory industry that gets us to fruit flavored snacks. The hard barrier to take us from licorice flavored medicine candy to Scooby Doo or perhaps Welch's fruit flavored snacks, ironically, is sugar. But the solution to this issue is a master class in industry and human biology. Follow me closely here. When factories started refining sugar on a massive scale, prices plummeted. But pure sugar doesn't really taste like much at all. And if you boil pure sucrose and eat it, it tastes intensely sweet, sickening even. Your mouth just gets overwhelmed within seconds, no pause. Manufacturers had to solve the sugar problem. Their answer was food acid, primarily malic and citric acid from the pomace of sour apples and Italian lemons from the mob. No, really. The mafia ran the lemon game in the late 1800s. Look it up. Long story short, though, lemons are the perfect crime fruit. So acid matters here because it cuts through that heavy sweetness. It makes you salivate and it, and it and it creates this sharp, refreshing sensation in your mouth, on your tongue. Oh, no. Because human taste buds naturally associate sharp acidity with ripe or tart fruits, candy makers couldn't pair acid with regular flavors from before like chocolate, mint, or vanilla. And just pairing citric acid with sugar doesn't really make it taste like green apple or something, it just tastes like sweet and sour. Think of it like eating or drinking something sour or spicy while you're congested. There's no taste, but there's still that stimulating mouthfeel, if that makes sense. You still get the sensation, even if there's no flavor. This video is about candy, by the way, not chocolate. By definition, non-ingredient chocolate is candy. But we're being dishonest with ourselves if we say a Snickers bar and Skittles are in the same category. They're not. One is a roasted seed paste from an actual tropical fruit, while the other is an industrial sugar matrix designed to mimic real fruit. The only thing they have in common is there's sugar, if we're being real. Tell me in the comments, am I right or wrong? I think I'm right. The acid sensation is one half of the fruit candy thing, but how do we get to synthetic strawberry and grape flavors? Well, it's the last place you'd expect. Around the same time we figured out our food acid scheme, chemists unlocked synthetic flavoring. They figured out that esters, simple chemical compounds often derived from cheap industrial byproducts like coal tar, happened to mimic the scent and taste of fruits. Somehow. Deep vanilla or chocolate profiles required hundreds of volatile compounds working together in one accord, but a fruit note could often be faked with a single ester. Isoamyl acetate smelled like banana. Ethyl butyrate smelled like pineapple. Methyl anthranilate smelled like concord grape. It sounds like magic, doesn't it? Butyric acid is the chemical that gives body odor and vomit its horrible smell, but combined it with the alcohol of grain or fruit, you have a tropical pineapple scent, or something close enough to tropical pineapple. Tasting is done long before anything goes in your mouth, which opens up a huge world of flavor options. If you pair a cheap synthetic ester and a dose of citric acid with With a mysterious red dye. Oh my god, cherry. Oh my god, strawberry. Wow. Gullible our brain. Once this connection is made, food chemists are able to run wild with flavors. You ever thought about how purple just tastes like purple? This close enough chemistry is the reason why. By the way, if you learned anything at all so far, drop me a like and hype the video. It really does help. Thank you. In the 1970s, after federal health bans hit red dye number two, companies faced a challenge in distinguishing raspberry from cherry and strawberry on store shelves. In response, they did something that tells us a lot about how much fruit-flavored candy is just a total mind trick. FD&C Blue No. 1, with a high acid raspberry flavor, gives us blue raspberry, a flavor from a fruit that flat out does not exist, and we don't even question it. Yet, everybody loves it. A testament to how much we really do just taste with our eyes. Red dye and white wine tricks even the most experienced tasters. TikTok drink guessing challenges exist, and people have noticed that Fruit Loops are all the same flavor, and that's just one example. Try it for yourself. With closed eyes, reach into the bag and eat a piece of candy and take note of how long it takes to determine its flavor without having a visual cue. This visual conditioning from the food acid plus aromatic ester formula lets a food manufacturer assign really any flavor they want depending on the regional market without changing much at all about the recipe. Methyl Anthranilate naturally occurs in Concord grapes, so the purple, usually grape flavored candy that Eric and his team of food scientists made with chemicals tastes like predictable grape to Americans. But foreigners describe that same grape candy as tasting like flowers or perfume, since Concord grapes are rare outside of the US. Isoamyl Acetate with low acid tastes like jackfruit to someone from Southeast Asia because jackfruit is common there, but the same combination is very clearly banana to an American. Change the perception, change the flavor. Speaking of banana, it's the one flavor that's probably the strangest out of the standard American lineup. Virtually everyone agrees that yellow banana candy tastes nothing like the bananas you buy from the disorganized banana pyramid at Walmart. I'm sure you've heard the story. 1950s banana plantations in Central America and the surrounding area grew just one genetic clone, the Gros Michel, aka the Big Mike. But the Panama disease hits and wipes out entire farms in months, forcing the growers to replace the old Big Mike with the disease-resistant Cavendish. Which is unfortunate. I'm told the Big Mike tastes way better than the Cavendish. You've probably heard the popular trivia line, chemists model banana candy on the Gros Michel, not the Cavendish. It's a great story, but it's also mostly a myth. Banana flavor is not based on the Gros Michel. When European scientists in the 1850s were playing around with chemicals and made isoamyl acetate, they noticed it happened to smell like some kind of tropical fruit. Close enough, right? So they sold it as banana essence, decades before the Gros Michel gained popularity around the world. That's right, it was all just a chemical coincidence. Chemists were not harvesting isoamyl acetate from the Gros Michel, or any fruit for that matter. They made it in a lab by mixing acetic acid from concentrated vinegar with isoamyl alcohol, a toxic byproduct of brewing whiskey. The Gros Michel naturally produced massive amounts of isoamyl acetate, making 19th century real bananas smell remarkably close to the cheap lab chemicals. Once again, We are reminded that this whole process of candy flavoring is literally a step below magic. So, our groceries change, not our banana candy. Even if you couldn't specifically explain what it's made of, I doubt you're shocked to learn that your favorite candy is mostly just colorful lab chemicals that taste like… close enough. But in the 2020s, we do not mess with the synthetic stuff like we used to, and that's a good thing. We much prefer all-natural labels on our packaging and zero petroleum derivatives in our food. Problem is, there just aren't enough real bananas or pineapples on Earth to flavor the world's candy supply, and trying to do so is wildly inefficient and wasteful. So how do giant corporations give us natural flavors without ever touching a single piece of fruit? Well, they use a scam. I'm sorry. They use microbial livestock. To get natural flavoring, you put away the whiskey and coal tar and instead fill giant fermentation vats with genetically engineered bacteria and yeast. Feed these microbes cheap corn syrup and agricultural waste, then the bacteria digest the sugar and excrete the exact same citric acid, butyric acid, and fruity ester molecules. Do you see where I'm going with this? Because a living organism produced it, FDA regulations allow companies to legally stamp 100% natural flavor on the label. But that label does not mean unprocessed or at all healthy. In fact, so-called natural flavor mixtures can actually contain dozens of secondary synthetic chemicals. But food companies are not required to disclose these extra ingredients. Organic is a strictly regulated term. Natural is not. And the average parent is actually not an organic chemist privy to the fine chemical terminology distinctions. 100% natural flavor is usually a marketing scam. But this is just the tip of the food scam iceberg, as I'm sure you're aware. Sicilian lemons to coal tar waste in industrial labs to feeding bacteria to excrete natural strawberries. It was never about the fruit flavor being great for a sugary treat, but instead about finding the shortest, cheapest path to tricking the human brain. And fruit was the easiest shortcut. I enjoy answering questions about American history and culture. If you like this, you'll like these too. Thanks for watching.