RFK Jr. and the chocolate factory

Big News in Maha World yesterday, Kali means an advisor to R.F.K. Jr. and one of the administration's loudest critics of ultra-processed foods announced he was stepping down. An eagle-eyed reporter with the Wall Street Journal noticed and reported that shares of food companies jumped in the hours after means announced his resignation, apparently signalling relief from big food that a nemesis was departing. What means, who is a bit of a brawler, replied to the reporting on Twitter. This is a mystery by the markets. Moms are not going to settling for their kids being poisoned for general meals to gain 8% on their stock. This cultural movement has just started and we are not going back. Today on Today Explained from Box, the Maha movement has been trying to strong-arm food companies into changing how they do things in the interest of our health. That eagle-eyed WSJ reporter is going to tell us just how hard that really is, starting with the blue M&M. 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We talk all about the incredible restaurants he's worked in, the best music to play in the restaurant bathrooms, and how he reacted when he found out his restaurant, Caboa, had been ranked number one by the New York Times. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers! My name is Jesse Newman, and I'm a food reporter for the Wall Street Journal. We're going to be talking about the blue M&M today. Among other things, your family has some sort of history with the blue M&M. What is it? That makes it sound a lot shadier than it really was, so by mother, peanut M&Ms were her snack of choice. Somehow when my younger sister was little, she started collecting blue M&Ms, and she would hoard them squirrel style, and she wouldn't even eat them, but she would take all the blue M&Ms out of the pack and put them in the freezer. I'm pretty sure when she left for college, my mother handed her these bags of blue M&Ms, and I had been in the freezer for years, so it makes us sound a little serial killer or something. That's not bodies, you're okay. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFKJR, has got some issues with the blue M&M. What exactly happened? How did it draw his attention? Yeah, artificial colors are, I would say, one of the main ingredients, additives, into food that are in his crosshairs. I was talking with my staff about these petroleum-based eyes, and I just said if they want to eat petroleum, they ought to add it themselves at home. They shouldn't be feeding it to the rest of us. Doritos, cheeses, cat and crunch, gummy bears, the ingredients include a lot of poisons, including a harmful yellow dye called tetrasine or yellow dye number five. He is not a fan of any sort of chemical, or he's really concerned about toxins in our food. Something is poisoning the American people, and we know that the primary culprits are changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods. And blue one, which is the food dye that makes blue M&Ms blue, that is a synthetic chemical, and he really takes issue with artificial dyes. He believes that they cause hyperactivity in kids, some neurological challenges, also he thinks artificial dyes are linked to cancer, so there's a whole, it sort of runs the gamut, his concerns about artificial dyes and foods. But he formally, as a member of the Trump administration, he formally sort of set out to get them removed, didn't he? Yeah, oh yeah, he's been putting a lot of pressure on the industry to strip artificial dyes from all kinds of products. Food or kids eating today is not really food, it's food like substances, and some of it was made in petroleum refineries. What do we know for real, for real, factually about artificial dyes? We do, we hear that they're bad for us, we hear that a lot of things are bad for us, we're all still alive and kicking. Are artificial dyes like really detrimental to our health? So if you look back, FDA for decades has said that the artificial dyes, or nine artificial dyes that they had originally approved for use in food, and they said that those artificial dyes are safe, and have said so for years and years and years, as have other global bodies, so long as they're used in accordance with some of the standards that FDA laid out. And there are other bodies that have found California, as an agency in California that has found that dyes are linked again to hyperactivity in children, and FDA itself has said, okay, we think that these dyes are safe for the vast majority of kids, but some kids might be more sensitive to them and others. So I think the real issue is that it's a chemical doing, they're purely cosmetic, they don't do anything except color food. So there is no nutritional benefit that you are getting from these dyes, and so do we need them? Absolutely not. I think one of the issues is just that if you're looking at, you know, the ways our food contribute to health problems, artificial dyes is probably pretty low on the list. Okay, so the maker of M&Ms is Mars? Yep. Mars company? All right. So you went inside a factory where they make M&Ms, and you looked at how they're trying to make this happen. Tell me everything. So I went to this plant in Topika, Kansas to see how they were made, and, you know, it's a massive industrial food plant where they sort of mix these colors and spray them onto what they refer to as lentils. They call, you know, these sort of small chocolate orbs, they call them lentils. And then the M&Ms move through the plant and they arrive at these massive, they're called pans, but they look like, you know, they look like big tumble dryers. And the M&Ms just tumble around in these pans and the color is sprayed on. So it's a very, very industrial process, millions of M&Ms a day, and, you know, the challenge that Mars has now is making that happen with a natural dye instead of an artificial one. So a blue natural dye is the challenge. What are they got? So they've been working on this for years, and they, what they went with is a product called spirulina, which is made from algae, but spirulina comes with a host of problems that they are now dealing with. You know, blue one, which is the artificial dye, it arrives at the factories as a liquid. And they just poured into these mixers and they mix it up with this, you know, sugary syrup, and it's pretty easy to handle. Spirulina arrives as a powder. So now you're mixing a powder into this same mixture, into the same recipe, and that is very different also because it's a protein, the resulting mixture becomes a lot thicker. So what they found was that the mixture containing spirulina, that it would really clog up, the clog up the piping, essentially. It was getting stuck, it just moved less smoothly through the pipes. Also because it is a protein, it was starting to coat, sort of build up on the inside of the machinery. And when that happens, it's a food safety hazard, it can mold, it can cause problems. So it's for many reasons, it was just really a challenge to handle. Was this an expensive process? I'm just thinking of clogged pipes, and some of my experience with that clogged or frozen pipes, it does tend to be very expensive, how much did this all cost? Well, I should say it's not done. Mars wouldn't give me an official figure for how much, but they said that there are spending millions, millions of dollars, they're having to retrofit their plants, essentially. They're having Mars said that they're having to change about 300 types of machinery in their plants. So it is, it's a real investment, and at the end of the day, it all comes down to cost. So what did they actually end up getting done? What was the outcome here? Well, so if you go back, Mars said what they committed to was that they were going to release an option, a new option, a new version of their M&M's and a few other of their products this year that was made with natural dyes instead. of artificial dyes. In March 2026, products made without food, drug, and cosmetic colors will be available in the United States across gum, fruity confections, and chocolate candy from several of our iconic brands. Extra, skittles, starbursts, and M&Ms. They didn't come out and say we're eliminating artificial dyes, and so folks should be really clear about that. Their artificially dyed M&Ms aren't going anywhere. They're still on shelves. So the what they said is that they're going to come out with an option that is naturally dyed. So they tried to do that. And what they found was that they couldn't. They couldn't at a cost that was acceptable to them because it was challenging with the blue and with the spirulina. It would have been far too expensive to make it work at scale. We're talking millions and millions and millions of M&Ms per day. And so this year, earlier this year, they launched online only. They launched a naturally dyed version of M&Ms with red, orange, yellow, and green M&Ms. And if you take a look at this bag, my colleague referred to these as a terminal. They look very a terminal. It really isn't the same. It looks like a very mature person's M&Ms. Have you spoken to your sister about any of this? She's not hoarding them anymore. I'm happy to say. At the end of the day, what are the changes to the M&Ms? Let's say I'm to go online and get the natural dyed ones. What does that mean for my health? Am I now a healthy and virtuous person if I'm meeting the optimal M&Ms? I would say it means very little. Hopefully you're still enjoying that sugary treat and pick me up in the afternoon as you're starting to flag. But you're still eating candy. You're still eating sugar. It really hasn't changed very much. When we return, what has Maha accomplished so far? Jesse Newman is going to come back. Are you tired of hearing about business, tech and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday, and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the Internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late-night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger fam. Support for this show comes from policy, genius. Life insurance is the kind of thing you want to get right. 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I'm the kind of guy like to sit with Reese's Spoon and Wonder Chief. Should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs with the side order gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I've seen the food. Do you know what it is? It's a day explained. Okay, so Jesse, in the first half of the show, we talked about the time and trials and money spent getting artificial colors out of M&Ms. But RFK Jr.'s ambition is much, much bigger than that. If we were to think about a grocery store, what is RFK Jr.'s ideal grocery store look like? What's in there? What's not in there? Yeah. So, you know, if you think about the totality of food initiatives that he has talked about and the way he talks about food, you know, he's very concerned with processed food. He's very, you know, he talks about processed food sort of poisoning kids. We are poisoning ourselves and it's coming from, you know, principally these ultra-process foods. We shouldn't be giving 60% of the kids in school processed food that is making them sick. And he's really encouraged people to eat, you know, far less ultra-processed food and to eat more whole foods. The new guidelines recognize that whole nutrient dense food is the most effective path to better health and lower healthcare costs. So, you know, we're talking produce, we're talking, you know, meat. So, you know, his ideal version of the grocery store would probably, you'd probably see a lot of steak. You'd see a lot of whole fat, you know, milk, butter, you'd see a lot of beef tallow. You would see, you know, a lot less packaged food if any. You know, and he encourages people essentially to shop more on the perimeter of the grocery store and to cook meals from home. And so, you know, there just be a lot more raw whole foods rather than, you know, rather than what comes in packages. He has an idea of what he wants. He's been in this role for a year plus. How many changes, like real changes along the lines of we're going to try to make an naturally blue M&M? Could I actually see if I were to go in the grocery store this afternoon? So, the food industry is making a lot of changes. Not all of them have anything to do with RFK Jr. And, you know, one of the big criticisms of him in particular is that he talks a lot. He has asked the food industry to do a lot of things, but he has done very little when it comes to, you know, actual rulemaking or, you know, mandatory requirements. So, really, you know, there are changes that we're seeing in the grocery store, but they relate to, you know, big consumer trends that were already in the works well before Maha. Now, Maha has really brought a lot of these issues to the fore and sort of accelerated, you know, the conversation. But, you know, for example, take protein. You know, RFK talks about protein, quite a bit, and, you know, wants you to be eating a lot more red meat and whole fat dairy to make sure that you're getting a lot of protein. But protein is, you know, there was sort of a protein craze well before RFK and Maha. Aiko just came out with protein waffles. We got strawberry, we got chocolate. I'm going to try them today. Wow, look at those nacho cheese chips. 16 grams of protein? That's good. That is good. Now, eat it like a rabbit chip bun. Pop tarz protein have 10 grams of protein. New Pop tarz protein. When you're looking for the satisfaction of a Snickers with the nutrition you desire to power to your day, try a Snickers high protein bar. So, you know, the fact that you're seeing protein sort of like sprinkled over everything in the grocery store has, that conversation has really intensified, you know, since he has been in office, but it didn't start with him. Since RFK Jr. has been pushing food companies to remove artificial dyes, they, you know, they've been working on it. So today, I believe General Mills has removed all artificial dyes from their cereals. And so, you know, if you look at tricks in the grocery store today, tricks will not be made with any artificial dyes. Trixels are for kids, silly rabbit. So, that is a change that you can see. You'll see a more, a more muted version of, of tricks. And Kellogg, you know, which owns Pritloops is working on this too. So, the colors are the, you know, one of the most significant changes, but it's, you know, it's not all food. It's, you know, many companies have made commitments, not all. How is he actually putting pressure on the companies to get this done? Is he calling them up and being like, I will call you out in a white house press briefing if you don't make these changes? Like, there's got to be some amount of leaning on these companies here, right? Oh, there's a ton of it. And it started, you know, even before he was put in position as the, as health secretary, you know, if you recall, during President Trump's campaign, that is when Mahat really started to gain a footing, and, you know, RFK Jr. was all over the airwaves, you know, saying that the very first thing he was gonna do was get artificial dyes out of fruit loops. - If you look at a pack of fruit loops in this country, it's all chemical dyes, yellow, blue, red dye, which are poison. These kind of chemicals are designed to make us insatiable continually eating all day, never full, never satisfied. - So, you know, this was before he was anywhere near HHS, and so he has really used social media, he's really now his bully pulpit to sort of put pressure on companies by calling them out by name, including, you know, by talking about fruit loops, I think he talked about Twinkies, and so, you know, he has put a lot of public pressure, you know, just through what he has said. And that has, you know, that has been powerful in some ways in getting some of these commitments from companies. The challenge is that these commitments are all voluntary. There's no regulatory teeth behind any of them. And so, you know, the concern, of course, is that if enthusiasm for this fades, if consumer trends change, you know, if Mahat goes away, that these companies can just as easily, you know, revert back to artificial dyes or other ingredients, but there's nothing, there's nothing really at this point that's barring them from changing their minds. - The question is what the competition does, right? Because there are M&Ms, and then there's half a dozen knockoff M&Ms. Do other companies need to follow in Mars's footsteps here? Less, they be, you know, either called up by RFK, or consumers are like, "Oh, that's the unhealthy M&M." Look, how do you see this playing out in the actual, in the field of competition among food companies? - Well, that's the crux of it for food companies, right? Is that they always say that they want to follow the consumer and they want to, you know, give consumers what they want. And so, in some ways, there are a lot of these policy areas where food companies would prefer for there to be some sort of actual mandate from the government so that there is a level playing field. So that, you know, if one company is taking out artificial dyes that their competitors have to do that too, because they are, you know, they're concerned that if their competitors aren't doing it, you know, they're pressured to and competitors aren't doing it, then, you know, will they lose sales or, you know, will customers go over to the competitor? So they just want to be sure that they, you know, that they aren't jeopardizing sales. - Are the all natural foods more expensive? Are consumers paying for them, paying more for them in any way? - You know, in many cases, whether it's a cereal with protein in it, or, you know, another product with more fiber, or, you know, a potato chip using avocado oil instead of seed oil. In many cases, these products, you know, are sold at a premium. They are more expensive. And that is a huge tension between, you know, this moment in which health secretary Kennedy is, you know, encouraging food companies to reformulate their recipes and the, you know, and the fact that food prices are significantly higher than they, you know, were five years ago and consumers, you know, many of them are really stretched. And so they, you know, aren't in a position to pay more for food. - Is RFK Junior getting any pushback from anybody? Companies, consumers, a White House that might tell him, look, buddy, we're, you know, people are five minutes away from getting the pitch works out and running around the streets because they're too broke to afford the Aldi bill. Like, is anyone telling him, nope? (upbeat music) - I would say he's getting pushed back from a lot of different corners. We've seen a number of his initiatives on ultra-process foods stall because there is such concern over affordability that's, you know, the run up to the midterms. This is the last thing that the administration wants to do, is to, you know, enforce or is to create any regulations that are seen as potentially jacking up, you know, consumers' personal bills. And we just had a story a couple of weeks ago. The government is trying to define ultra-process foods, you know, it's clear that our key junior wants to have this definition so that down the road, it can be incorporated into labeling. So the government has been working on a definition and HHS came up with the definition and that has been held up. So a definition exists, but it's been held up, you know, by the administration at the White House because there's, you know, there has been a lot of concern about affordability and then just also about other challenges that need to be thought through. So there's concerns about litigation that food companies are facing. There's concerns about trade. And so this has just run into a lot of questions and opposition within the administration. All right, so if we look back again, we are almost two years into the second Trump administration. If we look back at what has changed, what has not changed, what has stalled, how close have we come to making America healthy again? I think there's a long way to go. Again, because so many of Kennedy's initiatives, there has been no rule. There has been no advancing any regulatory agenda. It's just been sort of a pressure campaign from HHS. And again, we're, you know, we're talking about artificial dies when it comes to sort of the chronic disease crisis that the America is facing. You know, we're talking about diabetes, we're talking about heart disease. And, you know, these are really big problems and a huge portion of American diets are still made up with ultra-process foods. Food, access and affordability is still a huge concern. I think, unfortunately, the progress has been pretty slow. Jesse Newman covers food for the Wall Street Journal. "Hutting Woggy" produced today's show in "Jolly Meyers" edited. Gabriel Dunnatov checks the facts for Dr. Dunn again and David Tadashore engineered. The rest of us in a sending hide order miles Brian Daniel, he would orient a Spoodoo dust into Soto-Kelly Westinger, Denise Gara, and Peter Balanon-Rosen. Our supervising team is Avishai Artsy and Omanel Saadi. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Brickmaster Cylinder. My co-host is Sean Ramaswamy. Today, explained is distributed by WNYC in the show's part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more, visit podcast.voxmedia.com. Listen and free by signing up at Vox.com/members. I'm Newell King, it's today, explained.