Most soda gets its color from synthetic dyes — Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1 — which are made from petroleum. Naturally colored soda uses pigments from plant sources instead. Reckon gets its red from black carrot and its gold from orange carrot. Same job, different source. Two colors, two carrots.
Color is the part of a soda nobody thinks about until they read the label. But it's one of the clearest tells for how a drink was made. Here's what's actually going on in the can.
How soda gets its color in the first place
Soda is mostly carbonated water. Left alone, most of it would be close to clear. The color has to come from somewhere, and there are really only two options: synthesize it, or pull it out of something that grew.
Synthetic dyes won the twentieth century for practical reasons. They're cheap, they're consistent batch to batch, and they don't budge. Red 40 looks exactly like Red 40 in January and in July, in every can, forever.
We're not going to tell you that's a scandal. Plenty of good people drink Red 40 and are doing just fine. Our reasoning is simpler than that: if the can says cherry, we'd rather the color came from something you could grow.
What is black carrot?
Black carrot is exactly what it sounds like — a deep purple-black carrot, and one of the more useful plants in a soda maker's toolkit. It's full of anthocyanins, the same class of pigment that makes blueberries blue and red cabbage red.
Pressed and concentrated, black carrot throws a red shade close enough to Red 40 that it can do the same job. That's what gives Reckon Cherry its deep ruby color. Not a dye — a vegetable.
And the gold? Also a carrot
The pigment that makes an ordinary carrot orange is called carotene, and it is the same thing doing the work in Reckon Apricot. On the ingredient panel it appears under its full name, beta-carotene, which sounds like a laboratory but is simply the orange in a carrot, and it's natural.
So both flavors are colored by the same vegetable wearing two different coats. The black one turns the Cherry ruby; the orange one turns the Apricot gold. It is a tidier answer than we had any right to expect, and it is the honest one.
Why we color with plants
Honestly? Because it's consistent with everything else we're doing. Reckon is a tart craft soda built on an old-world recipe and brightened with tart cherry and apricot flavor. It's naturally flavored. Making an exception for color — piping in a synthetic red because it's easier — would be a strange place to cut a corner.
It's also a small-batch operation, run by a small team based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio — small enough that we notice things. Natural pigments are more temperamental than synthetics; they're more sensitive to light and time. That's a trade we're willing to make.
What that means for your can
Mostly: nothing. It looks like cherry soda and apricot soda ought to look. But if you ever notice a can pouring a shade deeper or lighter than the last one, that's not a defect — that's a plant, doing what plants do.
How to read the color line on a soda label
Next time you flip a can over, the color line tells you a lot in about four words:
- "Red 40," "Yellow 5," "Blue 1" — synthetic dye.
- "Caramel color" — the workhorse behind most colas.
- "Carrot concentrate," "beta-carotene," "vegetable juice for color" — it came from a plant (beta-carotene, for instance, is what makes carrots orange, and it's natural).
Reckon's label reads carrot concentrate and beta-carotene — it's what makes carrots orange, it's natural — alongside carbonated water, barley malt extract, and invert sugar. (It contains wheat, so it isn't gluten-free.) About 1/3 the sugar of a typical cola, caffeine-free, 80–90 calories a can.
See both colors side by side in the Cherry + Apricot variety pack, browse the lineup at Shop All Fizz, or see them on the shelf at a Cleveland store. It's Gonna Be OK.
Frequently asked questions
What gives Reckon soda its color?
Carrots, in both cases. The Cherry is colored with black carrot concentrate, a deep purple-black carrot rich in anthocyanins, which throws a ruby red. The Apricot is colored with carotene, the pigment that makes an ordinary carrot orange, listed on the panel under its full name beta-carotene, and it's natural. Neither flavor uses Red 40, Yellow 5, or caramel color, and both colors are named plainly in the ingredient list on the can rather than hidden behind a phrase like "artificial color." The practical consequence is small but real: plant pigments are more sensitive to light and time than synthetic dyes, so one can may pour a slightly deeper or lighter shade than the last. That is the pigment behaving like the vegetable it came from, not a fault in the batch.
Why do most sodas use artificial dye instead?
Cost and stability. Synthetic dyes are cheap, consistent batch to batch, and hold their color under light and time. Plant-based colors cost more and are harder to keep steady, which is the tradeoff a maker takes on when using them.