Real GA USA

Crumbl’s website has a full ingredient list for every cookie. It just doesn’t show it to you. Pick a store on their website and open the allergen page. What you see is a grid of checkmarks for milk, egg, wheat, soy and nuts, and a line that says additional nutrition information available upon request. What the page sends to your phone underneath that grid is a field called ingredientsList, one per cookie, that never gets drawn on the screen. I pulled this week’s lists from the Michigan Avenue store in Chicago this morning. The Pink Sugar Cookie frosting is colored with red food coloring made of water, propylene glycol, Red 40, Red 3 and propyl paraben. FDA revoked Red 3 for food in January 2025, with a deadline of January 2027 to get it out. The chocolate chips in the Chocolate Chip Cookie are sugar, palm kernel fat, dry milk and cocoa powder with vanillin, which is a compound coating and not chocolate. The Tres Leches Cake starts from a boxed white cake mix. Most of this week’s cookies use imitation vanilla. The Dubai-Style Chocolate Brownie is 1,020 calories and 81 g of sugar, and that’s the number for one brownie, not a slice. Restaurants don’t have to publish ingredients, so Crumbl is within the rules. It wrote the lists anyway, loaded them onto the page, and left them off the screen. Its sales were down about 70% from last year in August and at least 60 stores have closed this year.

Skittles in the UK are colored with beetroot and turmeric. Skittles in the US are colored with Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. Mars makes both. The US bag lists sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, then 9 color entries, which are Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1 and Blue 2, most of them listed twice as a dye and a lake. The UK bag lists sugar, glucose syrup, palm fat, then colours E162, E163, E170, E160a, E100, E132 and E133. E162 is beetroot. E163 is anthocyanin, the pigment in grape and berry skins. E100 is turmeric, E160a is carotene, E170 is chalk. The UK bag still uses 2 synthetic blues, E132 and E133, which are the same molecules as Blue 2 and Blue 1 here. So the reds, oranges and yellows got swapped for plants and the blues didn't. The titanium dioxide that used to whiten the US shell came out at the end of 2024.