Why is my lemon-lime soda turning green when I add spirulina?

Why is my lemon-lime soda turning green when I add spirulina?

Because spirulina is not yellow. It is blue-green. And when you drop a blue-green pigment into a citric acid beverage expecting it to replace Yellow 5, you get swamp water. This is one of the most common mistakes in natural color reformulation. Teams reach for spirulina because it is familiar and approved. But phycocyanin, the pigment in spirulina, absorbs red light and reflects blue. Mix that with a yellow base and the math gives you green every time. The fix is not spirulina at all. For a lemon-lime soda, you need a true yellow source. Safflower. Turmeric with proper encapsulation. Beta-carotene emulsions. Each one behaves differently at low pH, under carbonation pressure, and across shelf life. This is exactly the kind of application-specific logic that DyeConverter™ maps. You input the product type, pH, processing conditions, and target shade. The platform returns alternatives ranked by stability, regulatory status, and cost -- so your R&D team is not guessing their way through a reformulation that has a hard deadline. The 2027 clock is running. The wrong pigment in the wrong matrix costs months you do not have. #NaturalColorants #FoodFormulation #DyeConverter