Fun fact - this is how blue raspberry was created as a flavor. Raspberry flavored things were purple, made from a combination of red and blue dye. The red dye (red no 2) was banned. So companies making raspberry flavored stuff just left the red dye out and said "raspberry is blue now" and we all went "shit yeah it is, always has been! why would raspberry be anything other than blue?"
Common varieties of raspberries aren't purple, and I've never heard of raspberry flavor being purple.
So they didn't remove the red to leave blue, because there was never blue in the first place -- they just switched from red to blue, as this lengthy history explains:
I said "raspberry-flavored things" and I guess in the most inclusive sense raspberries are raspberry-flavored so well done there for making me put one finger in the air in outrage and then silently pull it back down while adopting a thoughtful expression. In a less-inclusive sense, raspberry-flavored things are flavored with "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety" according to the article so it could be argued that there are a lot of raspberry flavored things (including a dust cloud in space, https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/20726659/space-taste-like-ra...) but funnily enough raspberries aren't one of them.
> Food products labeled as blue raspberry flavor are commonly dyed with a bright blue synthetic food coloring, such as brilliant blue FCF (also called Blue #1) having European food coloring number E133. The blue color was used to differentiate raspberry-flavored foods from cherry-, watermelon-, and strawberry-flavored foods, each of which is typically red. The use of blue dye also partially is due to the FDA's 1976 banning of amaranth-based Red Dye No. 2, which had previously been heavily used in raspberry-flavored products.
- it's usually sold as "blue raspberry", not "raspberry"; so you know that it's nothing natural here
- it's mostly used in soft-drinks or other foods that are ~~nothing~~ anything but natural
So my guess is that nobody was thinking they were buying something made of actual rasperries; they knew that they were buying something 100% artificial like "mango madness" or "knockout fruit punch"
Never seen it as a slushie in Italy but we do have azure ice cream. It used to be called "puffo" (=Smurf) but smurfs aren't popular anymore, so now they usually sell it as "marshmallow" or "cotton candy".
Surely no visit to a UK chain cinema (Odeon/Vue) in summer is complete without a refreshing and sugar-free Tango Ice Blast?! It's the "UK’S N0.1 FROZEN DRINK BRAND", according to their own marketing.
And the two original, traditional flavours of Tango Ice Blast are Red (Cherry) and Blue (Raspberry).
In fact, I can't remember ever seeing any other flavours, although according to their website there are others:
Blue raspberry is a candy only flavor. It doesn't really taste like raspberry. Its pretty common as a flavor in the us at least, it's one of my favorite candy flavors.
I feel like you might run into it at a carnival or theme park. It's found in things like candy, Kona ice, extremely artificially flavored drinks, etc. Junk food.
