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Not Even M&M’s Safe from MAHA · Commentary - TJ Meadows

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The Maha movement is making a mess of one of
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: America's most iconic candies, Eminems Thinks a Lot RFK Junior.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Mars is
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: preparing to launch a version of Eminem's made without artificial dyes.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: The product is expected to arrive in stores in August.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Now that sounds easy enough until you realize Mars produces
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: roughly six hundred million M and MS every single day,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: six hundred million. The company has found natural replacements for red, orange,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: and yellow, using ingredients like beats and the like. Those
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: colors weren't especially difficult. Blue, however, has become a nightmare.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Nature doesn't offer many reliable sources for the collar blue.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Mars settled on speirulina and algae, often marketed as a superfood.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: The problem, spear ulina doesn't behave like the artificial dyes
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: it replaces. It clogs equipment foams during production, leaves sticky
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: residue inside machinery, and requires much larger quantities to achieve
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: the same color. As a result, Mars is spending millions
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: of dollars and modifying hundreds of machines just to make
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: blue candy. Blue and who pays for all that consumers.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: The irony here is wonderful. Blue eminems didn't even exist
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: until nineteen ninety five. Consumers voted to replace the ten
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: eminem with blue. The market created the product, government pressure
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: will now kill it. In fact, the first generation of
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: these naturally colored eminems won't even include blue candies or
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: brown ones for that matter, because brown coloring also depends
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: on blue dye. What this story really illustrates is the
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: difference between political slogans and economic reality. Getting rid of
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: artificial dyes was sold as simple, easy, common sense. Instead,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: it requires years of research, millions of dollars, factory upgrades,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: supply chain changes, and countless hours of labor to solve
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: a problem most consumers never noticed in the first place,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: let alone cared about. If people truly cared that much
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: about artificial dies, they could have stopped buying M and ms.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: That's how markets are supposed to work. Instead, politicians, including
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: those in Charleston, decided they knew better, and now a
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: candy company is spending millions of dollars trying to replace
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: a color that worked just fine.