Jackson schools remove food dyes from school lunch menus

JACKSON, Mo. (KBSI) – Jackson Schools are paving a successful path to student nutrition after they just became one of the first districts in the Southeast Missouri area to remove all food dyes from the cafeteria. 

As of January 2025, the use of red dye number 3 in foods is illegal in the U.S so it’s no longer being served in school cafeterias, but one local school district is going a step farther this year and removing all food dyes from school food. 

Bryan Austin is the Associate Superintendent of Safety and District Operations for Jackson Schools. He shares that they not only removed red dye but all dyes from all foods served at the district for the entire Jackson School District.

“Any kind of switch that we want to look at, we want to look at what is the benefit for kids in our community, and we saw a large benefit by doing this. We knew it’s a large task but when it comes down to all of our Jackson students and all of our community, we knew it was a positive switch for our district” says Austin.

According to the FDA synthetic food dyes are linked to health concerns like cancer risks and neurobehavioral effects in children.

Parents in the Jackson district weigh in on the switch to dye free at Jackson schools.

Carissa Bartlett, Jackson Parent “I would say it’s a positive opinion. I have a little bit of a mixture, but I’ve heard really good reviews on dye free. My concern would be budget costing. Like, is that going to be affordable? Is it going to be more on the parents and, and it’s the portions like how does that affect everything?”

Melody Merchant, former Jackson parent “My opinion is I completely, totally agree with them going dye free. I’ve done research on this myself. Dyes show to have effects with kids’ behavior, anxiety, all mental health and this would make a big improvement with that as far as cost. I think when it comes to our kid’s mental health and overall health cost shouldn’t really come into play here.” 

Austin shares that so far, the dye free food choices have been a hit with students!

“We’ve had positive feedback. You know, at the secondary level, they have salad bar setups where they can make their own. They have different fruit buffets. So, we’ve had a great amount of feedback from that, and our kids are loving it” shares Austin.