Why Our Strawberry Is Pink and Not Red

Someone asks this at the counter most weeks. It is a small question and it happens to explain a great deal about how we work.

The short answer

Because there is no colouring in it.

Strawberry puree, blended into a white cultured base, produces a soft dusty pink. That is simply what the pigment does at the concentration where the fruit flavour is right. Every vivid strawberry-pink frozen dessert you have seen has had colour added, because real strawberry at a realistic percentage does not look like that.

Why anybody adds colour

Not out of malice. Colour does real work in food.

People taste with their eyes first. Studies on this are consistent and slightly unsettling: a more intensely coloured food is perceived as more intensely flavoured, even when the flavour is identical. A vivid pink strawberry dessert will be rated as tasting more of strawberry than a pale one made from the same recipe.

So adding colour is not deception exactly. It is compensating for an expectation that the industry itself created.

Why we chose not to

Three reasons.

It would be the first compromise. Once colour is acceptable because it improves perception, flavouring is acceptable for the same reason, and then a powder base is acceptable because nobody can tell. Each step is individually defensible and the destination is a product we would not want to sell.

It signals honestly. A customer who notices our strawberry is pale has just learned something true about how it was made. That is a more useful thing to communicate than any claim on a menu board.

It sets a constraint we find useful. If we cannot make the colour better, we have to make the flavour better. That is a productive limitation.

The same logic elsewhere

• Our mango is pale gold, not the orange of most mango desserts.
• Our paan is a muted green, not the bright green people expect.
• Our rose is barely pink, because gulkand and rose do not carry much pigment.
• Our blueberry is greyish-purple, which is the real colour of blueberry in dairy.

What it costs us

Real things. Products photograph less well, which matters when Instagram is a meaningful acquisition channel. First-time customers occasionally assume a pale flavour is weak before tasting it. And every seasonal batch varies slightly, because fruit varies.

We think it is worth it. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to — but at least the reason is on the record.

How to spot it anywhere

Look at the colour of any fruit-flavoured frozen dessert. If it is vivid, uniform and identical every time you visit, something is producing that consistency, and it is not the fruit.