Major food producers and chain restaurants have to follow trends to stay relevant, and right now the trend is ditching artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives. The latest manufacturer to join this party is Kellogg, a company with falling sales since Americans just aren’t as into cereal as we used to be.

Kellogg is joining a party that’s been going on for the last few months, as a wide variety of food producers, including the other major U.S. cereal maker, General Mills, have announced that they’ll be removing artificial colors and flavors from their products. Other companies that have done the same this year include Nestlé USA, Campbell Soup Company, and Kraft and chain restaurants like Subway, Panera, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut.

Kellogg says that most of its cereals are already made without artificial colors (75% without) and artificial flavors (more than 50% without) and that they will remove the additives from 90% of its products by next year, finally phasing all of them out by 2018.

Key colorful cereals like Froot Loops are already made with plant-derived food colorings in international markets. Froot Loops in Australia, for example, use the following for their colours: “carmine, paprika, caramel I, turmeric, copper chlorophyll, and vegetable carbon.”

If they choose similar ingredients once natural ingredients are phased in, don’t tell your kids that carmine is a red coloring made from ground-up bugs. Or maybe they’d be more likely to eat it if they knew that.

Kellogg to stop using artificial products in cereals, snack bars [Reuters]

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