No, just the legal minimum for an ingredient list: Milk chocolate (and the parenthetical list of ingredients within), sugar, wheat flour, modified corn starch, carnauba wax, and colour.
The smarties.ca site FAQ on their new all-natural colours doesn’t go into specifics, but does link to the CFIA site on allowed natural food colours, wherein tumeric is listed as one of the accepted natural colourings (second table). I know Cochineal (Carmine) is the red colour derived from the Cochineal bug, which is likely what’s in use here and may account for some people’s ability to ascribe a flavour to the red Smarties (though I couldn’t tell the difference myself), but for the rest, I don’t know what most of them would taste like. It’s unlikely they’d use saffron in candies given how expensive saffron is, and that would probably be an orange colour anyway.
Sumac is sometimes used as a natural colouring, and that does have a lemon-like flavour, but it’s normally red, not yellow. It might be in there as a blended component of the yellow colouring though - maybe to make the yellow richer.
Well, the yellow colouring is certainly bright, but the tone is not what I would call warm. Still, if Sumac were a blended component, it would be in small quantities, and that could account for the faintness of the flavouring perhaps. On the other hand, riboflavin is a definite possibility. That’s been used as a listed vitamin in many cereals over here for ages, particularly kid’s cereals, presumably so they could legally make health claims about Sugar Frosted Sugary Sugar-O’s being part of a nutritious breakfast.
On a semi-related note, you lot across the pond must have more stringent laws regarding ingredients lists, because ours never get that detailed.
I have in front of me a package of Smarties imported into the United States. I had to peel off the avoirdupois weight sticker to get to the ingredients panel, which is different from the picture Mangetout posted.
The ingredients are:
(bolding mine)
It seems that the Smarties approved for sale in the United States do, in fact, have an orange flavor, or at least some do. The orange candies seem to be the ones that are orange-flavored. (duh) The flavor is also pretty obvious; it’s not like it “could be” orange, it’s definitely orange. And there appear to be no other flavorings besides orange and chocolate, or at least I can’t taste any.
Okay, I’ve started blind tasting - I can often, but not always, taste the red ones - they taste sweeter (almost like a fake cherry taste) than the others (if that’s cochineal, I kinda like the taste of red bugs ). Purple and pink basically taste less sweet than the others. Brown seems to have a slightly more bitter aftertaste than the others. Orange may possibly have a slight orange taste, but I doubt it, since I couldn’t really taste it (I think I’m just imagining it since people have mentioned it). Any flavour differences are extremely mild. The flavours are just listed on the box as “artificial flavours” - there is no notice of any specific flavour.
Ah-HA! So there IS actual lemon in there and I’m not imagining it or tasting some colouring that kinda has a kind of lemony tinge to it when tasted in small quantities. However…
…being that you’re in Canada as well I find it curious that you don’t taste the lemon. Not that I doubt your taste buds, but it does make me wonder if maybe there are variances from place to place here where the concentrations may differ, or perhaps even the ingredients in some places depending on availability of the natural components used.
Yeah, I didn’t taste anything that had a noticeable lemon flavour. Like I said, the only noticeable flavour was the red ones (and that wasn’t a huge difference).
One summer when I was in university, I had a job as a research assistant in the math department. The research assistants got together, bought some (Canadian) Smarties and tried to guess the flavours blindfolded. The guesses were no better than chance, but I have to add the caveat that we didn’t do a good job of cleansing the palate between tastings.
If the UK uses different red dye from the US, the red ones may be OK, but in the US, the red ones (M&Ms) are bitter due to red dye #40. I did not lament the temporary loss of red M&Ms here because of that.
I don’t know the answer, but you made me think of day I was looking at an assortment of Halloween candy in a dish and noticed a roll of “Smarties” sweet tarts hanging out next to a couple of “Dum-Dums” suckers. Made me wonder why each candy go the reputation they did with whomever named them.
). Purple and pink basically taste less sweet than the others. Brown seems to have a slightly more bitter aftertaste than the others. Orange may possibly have a slight orange taste, but I doubt it, since I couldn’t really taste it (I think I’m just imagining it since people have mentioned it). Any flavour differences are extremely mild. The flavours are just listed on the box as “artificial flavours” - there is no notice of any specific flavour.