What Flavor Is the Purple Skittle?

Skittles began in Britain in the 1970s, and US production started in 1982.¹ Mars makes them through its Wrigley division. The Original pack has five flavors, and four of them match on both sides of the Atlantic. Purple is the one that changes.

Australia's Original pack is different again, with grape and green apple.³

Why American grape tastes like that

US grape Skittles taste like grape soda, not like the green grapes in your fridge. The reason is one compound, methyl anthranilate. It occurs in American Vitis labrusca grapes such as Concord, and gives them their musky, floral smell, called "foxy". European Vitis vinifera grapes, which include most table and wine grapes, do not have it.⁴

The candy version is more than a century old. Around 1910, an American who made soda flavorings noticed that a perfume material sold as synthetic orange blossom smelled like Concord grapes. It was methyl anthranilate. Grape sodas built on it boomed in the 1910s,⁴ and American grape candy has tasted of Concord ever since.

Why Britain gets blackcurrant

In Britain, purple usually means blackcurrant. The UK Starburst pack carries one too.²

Most Americans never learned the taste. For decades in the 20th century, federal rules kept currants off American farms, because the plants host white pine blister rust, a disease of valuable timber pines. Those rules were revoked in the 1960s, and New York farmers only took up blackcurrants again in the early 2000s.⁵

Blackcurrant is also harder to build than grape. Its signature is a sulfur note. Trace thiols, such as 4-methoxy-2-methyl-2-butanethiol, smell of blackcurrant at very low levels and of cat at higher ones. Buchu leaf oil, which carries a related sulfur compound, is a traditional blackcurrant ingredient. Grape has nothing that touchy in it.

The green one changed too

Lime was the original green Skittle. In 2013 Skittles replaced it with green apple in the US and most markets outside Europe, which drew a consumer backlash.³ In September 2021 Mars Wrigley announced that lime would return permanently, starting that October.⁶ Europe kept lime throughout.

What it means if you build a purple flavor

Know which purple your market expects. Purple reads as grape in the US and blackcurrant in Britain. A grape product in the UK meets a different expectation, and a blackcurrant product in the US has almost no reference point.

Grape is forgiving; blackcurrant is not. Methyl anthranilate is sturdy and easy to dose. Blackcurrant's sulfur notes swing from fruit to cat with small dosing errors, and they fade with heat and oxidation. Ask for the blackcurrant to be tested in your base, at the end of shelf life.

Get the label right. Methyl anthranilate is made synthetically as well as found in nature. If synthetic material supplies the grape character, US rules require "artificially flavored" wording. See artificial flavor.

For more on how candy flavors survive processing, see confectionery.