Cheese is dyed orange because of a centuries-old trick that stuck. In 17th-century England, cheesemakers began adding plant-based colorings to disguise the fact that they’d skimmed off the valuable cream, which carried the cheese’s natural golden hue. What started as outright fraud eventually became tradition, and today the orange color persists mostly out of consumer expectation and regional habit.
Why Cheese Was Naturally Yellow in the First Place
The story starts with grass. When cows graze on fresh pasture, they consume beta-carotene, the same orange pigment found in carrots and sweet potatoes. That pigment passes into their milk, concentrating especially in the fat. Certain breeds, like Jersey and Guernsey cows, produce milk that’s particularly rich in beta-carotene, giving their cheese a noticeable golden or straw-like tint.
For English consumers, this warm color became a visual shorthand for quality. A deeper yellow meant the cheese was full-fat, made from rich milk, and came from well-fed cows. Nat Bacon, a cheesemaker at Shelburne Farms in Vermont, has described seeing the color shift firsthand each spring: the whey and finished cheese turn noticeably golden once cows move onto fresh pasture in early May.
A 17th-Century Scam That Never Ended
Once consumers associated orange cheese with high quality, cheesemakers spotted an opportunity. Many began skimming the cream off their milk to sell separately or churn into butter, both more profitable than leaving it in the cheese. The problem was that skimming stripped out the fat-soluble beta-carotene, leaving behind pale, white cheese that looked cheap.
The solution was simple: fake the color. Cheesemakers added plant-based dyes to make their low-fat product look identical to the rich, full-fat cheese that Londoners expected. Paul Kindstedt, a cheese expert at the University of Vermont, has traced this practice back to 17th-century England, where it was widespread enough to be considered a known fraud. As one Vermont cheesemaker put it more recently, “The history of annatto, some put it strongly, is like the history of fraud.”
Some early cheesemakers used carrot juice or beetroot to get the right shade. Over time, though, a single coloring agent became dominant and remains the industry standard today.
What Annatto Is and Where It Comes From
The orange dye in virtually all colored cheese is annatto, a pigment extracted from the seed coats of a tropical shrub native to Central and South America. The seeds are covered in a vivid reddish-orange coating, and the pigment can be pulled out by heating the seeds in oil or processing them in an alkaline solution. The active coloring compounds belong to the carotenoid family, making annatto chemically similar to the beta-carotene that gave cheese its natural color in the first place.
Annatto comes in both oil-soluble and water-soluble forms, which lets cheesemakers work it into different products and production methods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies annatto as permanently listed and exempt from certification, meaning it’s approved for general use in foods, drugs, and cosmetics without the batch-by-batch testing required for synthetic dyes. It’s considered safe for the vast majority of people, though rare allergic reactions have been documented. One case report described a patient who developed a severe allergic response to annatto in cereal, with skin testing confirming the dye as the trigger. Such reactions are uncommon enough to be published as individual case studies.
Why Some Regions Prefer Orange and Others Don’t
If you’ve ever noticed that Wisconsin cheddar tends to be bright orange while Vermont cheddar is usually white or pale yellow, that’s not a coincidence. It reflects two different philosophies that developed over time.
Vermont and New England cheesemakers generally skip the annatto, letting their cheese reflect the natural seasonal variation in milk color. The cheese shifts from paler in winter, when cows eat stored hay, to more golden in summer on fresh pasture. Wisconsin and other Midwestern producers, by contrast, adopted annatto to create a uniform, recognizable orange year-round. The coloring masks those seasonal shifts and gives the cheese a consistent appearance on store shelves.
England has its own regional traditions. Red Leicester, a cheese originally made in Leicestershire from surplus milk left over after Stilton production, has been colored with annatto since the 18th century. It’s orange enough to earn the “Red” in its name, which was formally added to distinguish it from “White Leicester,” an uncolored version made during World War II rationing when extras like dye were unavailable.
How Orange Color Shapes What You Taste
The coloring may have started as a visual trick, but it genuinely changes how people experience cheese. A 2024 consumer perception study with over 1,200 participants found that people associate orange cheddar with a sharper flavor, both when looking at photos online and when actually tasting samples. Light orange cheddar was the most preferred overall, beating out both dark orange and white versions.
The perception of “naturalness” is more complicated than you might expect. About half of survey participants considered white cheddar the most natural option, while roughly 40% actually picked light orange cheddar as most natural. Perhaps most surprisingly, about 31% of consumers rated white cheddar as the *least* natural option. Centuries of coloring have been so effective that for a significant chunk of shoppers, uncolored cheese looks wrong.
Dark orange cheddar, however, triggers skepticism. Both white and light orange cheddars scored higher on naturalness than deeply colored versions, suggesting there’s a tipping point where the dye becomes obvious enough to put people off.
Does the Dye Change the Flavor?
Annatto itself is essentially flavorless at the concentrations used in cheese. The taste difference people perceive between orange and white cheddar is almost entirely psychological, driven by the visual cue of color rather than any chemical change to the cheese. White and orange cheddars made from the same milk, with the same aging process, are nutritionally and structurally identical. The only real variable is whether a tiny amount of seed-derived pigment was stirred into the curds.
That said, there can be genuine flavor differences between white and orange cheddars at the store, not because of the dye, but because they often come from different producers with different recipes, aging times, and milk sources. Vermont’s undyed cheddars and Wisconsin’s orange cheddars reflect distinct cheesemaking traditions that go well beyond color.