Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disclosed details about his closed-door meeting with food company executives.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a new interview that he has given food company executives two years to remove Red 40 and other artificial dyes from their products.
“They said it’s going to take us a while. For example, the CEO of Pepsi, which owns Doritos, said … ‘The consumers like them to be very red, and we have not yet found a vegetable dye that we can match, but we’re going to do it.’ And I said they all have to be out within two years,” Kennedy said in the interview with CBS, which was released on April 9, disclosing details about the meeting for the first time.
The March 10 meeting involved executives from Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Tyson Foods, Kellogg’s, Smucker’s, and PepsiCo.
The Consumer Brands Association, a trade group representing PepsiCo and other food companies, also participated.
The association said after the meeting that Kennedy told the makers that the government wants companies to remove artificial dyes from foods.
“It went very well,” Kennedy said in the new interview. “I think they’re at the point where they see the writing on the wall.”
He said that the dyes are “clearly associated with a variety, a grim inventory of diseases, including cancers and behavioral disease and neurological disease like ADHD, and it’s very, very well-documented and they’re making, in many cases, the same products in this country have those dyes, and then they use vegetable dyes in Canada, Mexico, and Europe.”
Studies have linked artificial dyes with various neurobehavioral problems, the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment stated in a 2021 report analyzing the research.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January banned Red No. 3, one of the dyes, from food products, noting studies that found rats exposed to high levels of the substance developed cancer, but said, “claims that the use of [the dye] in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.”
