Petroleum waste turned billion dollar industry - a history of synthetic food dyes

Last week I chatted with some retired oil men about the 1960s in the oil and gas industry in Calgary. One of the men reminded me that at that time, there was no shortage of oil but there was a shortage of uses for it. He said that entire departments were created to find new ways to use oil in our society, to turn their waste into profit. This idea converged with another topic that I find endlessly fascinating, the history of synthetic food dyes. Most people don't realize food dye is made from crude oil, and now we know how that came to be. So I set out to find out more about the history of the creation of food dye, and its birth surprised me as it was political right from the very start. 

The great transformation of our food supply began in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., at a moment when a handful of powerful oil companies were quietly looking for new ways to profit.

Behind the scenes, major oil companies—flush with crude but facing a nagging glut of gasoline and slowing demand at the pump—were already hunting for surprising new places to put their refinery byproducts. The colorful, long-lasting food that fills the grocery store today is a direct legacy of two critical laws passed at the dawn of the 1960s: the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 and the Color Additive Amendments of 1960.

After WWII, the American food industry was booming. New processed "convenience" foods needed new chemicals to look appealing and stay fresh indefinitely. However, the existing law, the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, was ill-equipped to handle this explosion of new ingredients, which often entered the market without any pre-market safety testing from the FDA.

Enter Congressman James Delaney, a Democrat from New York. Concerned by the unregulated flood of chemicals into food, he chaired a select committee to investigate food safety. His findings were alarming, and he championed a clause that would bear his name, which became a central part of the 1958 Food Additives Amendment. This "Delaney Clause" was a seemingly ironclad provision stating no additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals could ever be approved for use in food. On the surface, it was a landmark consumer protection.

But industry had other ideas. The key figure in delivering their wishes was Congressman Oren Harris of Arkansas. As the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Harris was the gatekeeper for all legislation affecting commerce, communications, and critically, the oil and gas industries. It was under his watch that both the 1958 and 1960 bills were shaped.

Here is where the deception began. To get the industry to accept the stringent Delaney Clause, a massive, deliberate loophole was inserted into the 1958 amendment: the "Generally Recognized As Safe" or GRAS designation. Under GRAS, a manufacturer could unilaterally "recognize" its own new chemical additive as safe for human consumption using its own, often unpublished, data. They were not required to inform the FDA or seek any federal approval.

Two years later, the Color Additive Amendments of 1960 sealed the deal. While ostensibly creating a pre-market approval process for dyes, the 1960 act quietly incentivized synthetic colors by creating a legal pathway for them to be permanently listed for use. More importantly, it shifted the entire burden of proving a chemical safe onto the industry. Rather than being a neutral regulator, the FDA was now in a position of reacting to manufacturers' claims—with no authority to proactively test new chemicals before they entered the food supply.

With these laws in place, the stage was set. As the 1960s began, major oil companies faced a crisis of overproduction and slowing demand for gasoline. They aggressively diversified into the booming petrochemical business. This provided them with a vast, cheap, and previously underutilized stream of chemical byproducts from refining crude oil, such as toluene and benzene. These byproducts were the perfect raw materials to feed the new food additive market.

Sodium Benzoate, the first preservative ever approved by the FDA, is a perfect example. It is typically manufactured from toluene, a chemical derived directly from crude oil. Today, it is a staple in soda, fruit juice, and countless processed foods, ensuring your products can sit on a shelf for months or years without spoiling.

Synthetic food dyes like Red 40 (Allura Red) and Yellow 5 (Tartrazine). These brightly colored chemicals—now ubiquitous in children's medicine, cereals, candies, and sodas—are not born in a kitchen. They are synthesized from naphtha, a volatile liquid distilled directly from crude oil. Naphtha is the same raw feedstock used to make gasoline and plastics. Yet, the petrochemical industry learned to refine this industrial starter fluid into an additive no one thinks twice about.

This regulatory coup was extraordinarily profitable for the petrochemical industry. The new laws allowed them to profit from waste, turning low-cost refinery leftovers into high-margin specialty chemicals. While exact profit breakdowns are hard to isolate, the chemical industry's net profits in the early 1960s were reported at over $2 billion annually—a significant figure that heavily incentivized further research and development of new petroleum-based additives.

By 1960, the foundation of our modern, ultra-processed food system had been poured. Congressmen like James Delaney and Oren Harris, while operating on different sides of the issue, together forged a legal framework that was deeply co-opted by the industries it was meant to regulate. It prioritized a cheap, abundant, and visually appealing supply of food over a rigorously tested one and cynically placed the burden of proof on a public that had no idea what was being done in their name. Today, as the FDA slowly phases out six petroleum-derived dyes, the long, strange trip of the oil industry into our food supply may be coming to an end in America. Canada, slow to the uptick, has no plans to follow suit but this may change in the coming years.