A friend of mine claims that he can taste a difference between yellow M&Ms and the other ones. I call this bullshit. Could it be possible that he has such sensitive taste buds that he can actually taste the difference between the food colourings?
just do a blind taste test to prove it to you both.
It’s the flavor of yellow #1. 
Some fellow math students and I tried this with the vaguely similar Canadian candy Smarties (I was claiming that brown Smarties taste different). However, the problem we quickly ran into is that we couldn`t be bothered to properly cleanse our palates between candies and so the taste of chocolate quickly drowned out everything else.
If Canadian Smarties are the same as British Smarties, there certainly are differences in flavour. The orange ones contain orange flavoured chocolate. Also, according to Wikipedia:
The rest, I think, have always been regular milk chocolate.
It has been along time since I have actually eaten Smarties, but I am pretty sure that I have tasted brown ones with dark chocolate more recently than 1958. (I think there is only one shade of brown these days.)
I have never noticed any difference between the M&Ms, though. It is all the same crappy Hershey milk.
My wife is seriously allergic to the red dye in M&Ms. She can indeed taste the difference! I get all of the red and orange M&Ms in our family!
If your friend is as sensitive to the taste of the dye yellow #1, as my wife is to the red dye, then, yes he can!
You could be allergic to a dye without necessarily tasting a difference.
The red ones are bitter to me. I believe it’s the red dye- red velvet cake has the same bitter taste if the recipe calls for the red food coloring. The bitter taste isn’t as bad as it was back when I was a kid, though. My sisters and mother used to save me the sugar bells and roses off of the cake served at the wedding showers they would go to. The white and blue and yellow ones would taste fine, but the red ones were terrible.
BTW, a pox on blue M&Ms! The tan ones they replaced were the best ones!
Finally, someone who speaks the truth on the candypocolypse conspiracy to eliminate dull colors from candy. Speak brother, say AMEN! We want our tan back! Tan, the only color in plain that wasn’t in peanut! Back in the day when M&Ms came in only two flavors and we LIKED It that way!
yeah, I miss tan too. Part of my childhood disappeared when they disposed of tan.
Orange Smarties aren’t orange-flavoured in Canada. (From the Wikipedia link: “The orange Smarties contained, and still contain in the UK, orange-flavoured chocolate.”) I’m pretty sure they weren’t orange-flavoured in 1993 (when we did our experiment) either.
That paragraph says the difference in flavouring was discontinued in 1958, aside from the UK keeping up the orange chocolate.
I maintain that I can tell the difference between the white and pink Circus Animal Cookies (the pink ones taste better), so have no problem believing your friend’s claim.
There is a local baking company that produces frosted cupcakes with differing color frosting, some colors are intensely and consistently so bitter I think it must the the food dye.
There are a lot of flavour differences you can detect if you care: I’ve done tast tests for Food Science, and when the differences are pointed out they are obvious. Then I go back to not noticing.
An allergy often has the effect of making someone just “not like” some kind of food, without even being aware of the allergy. Why would you know you were allergic to some food if you just never ate it?
I had one patient who literally did not know the name of the fruit that caused his allergic reaction: a lifetime of not eating fruit had left him with very little knowledge of and less interest in fruit.
"Only a seven year old kid could actually taste the difference between like a red M&M and a light brown, M&M. That’s two totally different things when you’re seven years old. “Well, your red is more of a main course M&M, but the brown, it’s more of a mellower flavor; it’s an after-dinner M&M, really’’.”
- Jerry Seinfeld
As a kid, I rarely ate apples. Whenever I took a bite, I liked the taste, but just didn’t want to eat the apple. It was only as an adult (or teenager) I realized that when I eat an apple, my mouth itches terribly. Doh! It’s too bad, too, because apples really are delicious.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are food colorings that some people can taste. Look at it from the industry perspective: It wouldn’t surprise me at all that they’d pick a chemical that maximizes safety and coloring, at the expense that it’s detectable to a small number of people.
Genetics definitely affect what we can taste. To most people, cucumbers have a mild flavor, but to a minority with a specific allele (or perhaps, both alleles – it’s probably recessive), it has a very sharp and very bad taste. I love cucumbers, so I’m sure glad I’m not in the cucumber-hating phenotype.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the OP’s friend failed a blind test. It’s easy enough to do.
My friend will come over tomorrow and I will do the blind-test. Any ideas to clean his mouth from the flavour?
Rinse with warm water.