Why? How come fake rasberry candy/juice/food is typically colored blue? How did we get “blue rasberry” flavor? I think this is a recent trend, probably beginning within the last decade or so, but I could be wrong.
Sure, nothing else is blue (aside from blueberry) so it makes the flavor easy to identify compared to other “red” fruits (cherry, strawberry, fruit punch, etc), but why blue? Nobody confuses the red flavors anyway, so “easy to identify” really isn’t a good reason (read the packaging if you’re unsure). Blue just screams “chemicals” and “artificial” to me. At least try to color an artificially flavored food to look like the real thing.
mmmmm I love blue raspberry. Juice, candy, JELLO!!! And being a very very very picky eater it’s nice to see something blue and no exactly what it’s going to taste like (and that there’s a 99% chance that I’ll like it). Only problem is, blue raspberry always turns my mouth blue. It’s pretty obvious when I’ve been drinking blue margaritas!
Yeh, i forgot to mention the blue mouth. That’s another reason i disfavor “blue rasberry.” I like rasberry, but if it’s blue i tend to avoid it. Anyway… why blue??
Blame the French if you like, but in Britain I’ve never seen raspberry anything that was blue-coloured. Come to that I’ve never seen raspberry anything that was blue-coloured in France either. Maybe it’s nothing to do with Europe, but is an American affectation instead? It’s certainly not universal.
Also, in the thread samclem linked to, pulykamell (posting from Hungary) mentioned that there are black raspberries. I think those are what we would call blackberries. Can anyone give a definitive answer to what fruit we’re talking about here?
blackberries taste substantially different from rasberries. of course the artificially-flavored “blue rasberry” only tastes marginally like real rasberry, but it is clearly supposed to be an imitation of rasberry, not blackberry. I wouldn’t be surprised if blackberries and rasberries are closely related species, however.
The blue stuff from the OP could be more or less natural, although I wouldn’t bet on it.
There are quite a few species of brambles, in a variety of colours and flavours (The west coast has salmonberries, named for their pink/orange colour), and IIRC many combinations will cross. I think I read of a successful raspberry/blackberry cross a few years ago. So it should be possible to get a fruit with a raspberry’s flavour and a blackberry’s colour. Whether the manufacturers use real fruit is up to them; reading the label should tell you if they’re using lots of food colouring.
Blackberries and raspberries are closely related species; so closely related, in fact, that they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring (loganberries et al).
Blackberry juice is like litmus; when dissolved in an acid solution, it turns wine red, when in an alkaline one, it turns deep navy blue (- not the turquoise colour you see with the blue raspberry flavoured stuff though and I’m not sure if this has any relevance).
If this is any help, when you add an alkali to raspberry juice, it turns a purplish blue. Maybe the first users of it added some basic chemical for one purpose or another, found that the mixture turned blue, and then used it as an advertising gimmick to explain the strange hue.
