Stephen Ayers

Jet-Puffed marshmallows have blue dye in them. That's how they come out white. The bag reads corn syrup, sugar, dextrose, modified cornstarch, water, then under 2% of gelatin, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, natural and artificial flavor and Blue 1. Blue 1 is last on the list. Sugar foam isn't pure white on its own. Corn syrup and cooked sugar run a little yellow, and a trace of blue cancels yellow, so the eye sees the foam as bright white. It's the same reason why laundry detergent is blue, to make sheets look whiter. Campfire marshmallows list nearly the same ingredients without the Blue 1. Kraft Heinz said last year it's pulling FD&C colors from everything it sells in the US by the end of 2027, so Jet-Puffed has about a year to work out how to look this white without it.

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.