That’s right, everybody’s favorite bright orange mac and cheese changed its recipe—and not a single person noticed the difference, according to Eater. As part of a recent industry push to reduce preservatives, Kraft mac & cheese decided to rid their recipe of some of the fake stuff that people are afraid to feed their children. By eliminating artificial dyes, like creepy-sounding yellow 5, and replacing them with paprika, annatto, and turmeric, the company was able to keep their signature neon-orange cheese and classic blue-box flavor while making the product more natural. Their new tagline? “It’s changed, but it hasn’t.”
Sounds great right? Well, the only problem was that the public wasn’t convinced this recipe swap wouldn’t mess up the flavor many of us have grown up with and love.
Enter the idea to do what Kraft’s calling “the world’s largest blind taste test.” Kraft shipped out fifty million boxes of their new and improved mac & cheese, but didn’t tell anyone that it had been changed. The only way people would know would be if they looked at the ingredients label.
“We knew the recipe still tasted just as good as you expect from Kraft, but whenever you say you’ve changed something, consumers will say it probably won’t taste as good. Since we knew it tasted exactly the same, we wanted our fans to experience that for themselves without even being prompted,” Greg Guidotti, a Kraft spokesman, told Eater.
Kraft will now be rolling out a huge marketing campaign that will include changing the packaging to show the improvements they’ve made. Still, the mac will have the same amount of calories as it did before, so dieters beware.