Annatto Orange

Cheddar is a pale creamy yellow. Every orange block in the chiller has been dyed.¹

The dye is annatto, prepared from the seed of a tropical tree, and the reason it is in the cheese at all is a story nobody has pinned to a document.^{1, 3}

Start with what is firm. Annatto extract is a colour additive made from the seed of Bixa orellana, permitted to colour foods generally, and any product carrying it must say on the label that the colour comes from annatto seed.¹ Start also with why cheese is any colour at all. The pigment is beta-carotene, it arrives in the milk from what the cow eats, and the quantity tracks pasture closely: milk from a high-pasture system carries more than double the beta-carotene of milk from cows kept off grass entirely, and the concentration correlates with measured yellowness.² A cheese made from whole summer milk is therefore yellow without anyone intervening, and the depth of that yellow is a reasonably honest signal of how the animal was fed.

The usual explanation for the dye runs from there. Paul Kindstedt, a cheese historian at the University of Vermont, holds that seventeenth-century English cheesemakers skimmed the cream off to sell separately or churn into butter, which removed most of the pigment along with the fat, and then coloured what remained so it could still be sold as a full-cream cheese.³ Saffron, marigold and carrot juice came first on this account, with annatto arriving later.³ The explanation is repeated almost everywhere as settled history. It rests on the testimony of one historian; no records, dated sources or named cheesemakers accompany it in any freely available account.

What is not in doubt is the result. The colour was a signal about butterfat, and it has long since come loose from the thing it signalled. Orange cheddar is not richer than white cheddar. It is orange because buyers expect it to be.