Why is cheddar cheese (and some soap) orange? PS please do NOT eat Sun Basin soap

I just found out that cheddar cheese is a scam that is so old that everybody loves it now and nobody cares anymore.

I just found this out because I was obsessively googling the ingredients of Sun Basin soap, which is what this is.

This is not cheddar cheese.

This is Sun Basin soap.

But there's a reason why it looks so much like cheddar cheese.

So this is Trailblazer.

It smells like citrus and sage.

It does not smell like cheddar cheese.

But it does use the exact same food grade colorant as cheddar cheese, which is annatto seed.

So this is the seed.

They grind up the seed.

You can get various shades of red and orange and yellow with this seed.

Trailblazer actually uses different concentrations of it to get like a sunset effect, so it doesn't quite look like cheddar cheese.

But annatto is a very good colorant for soap because it is fat soluble and soaps are made of fats.

And so is cheese.

But why do you want to color the cheese in the first place?

Well, it turns out when the people who were making cheddar cheese centuries ago fed their cows with the Great Lakes summertime pasture grass, a lot

of carotene would make its way from the plants they were eating into the milk.

into the cow, into the milk, into the cheese, and it would make the cheese more yellowy or even orange.

And that of course was considered to be the highest quality cheese, the yellow or even orange cheese that you would get from the summertime cows.

But the rest of the year, or for the people who didn't have high quality pasture, those people would still get cheddar cheese made just like

cheddar cheese, but it would be considered to be lower quality cheese because it wasn't the summertime cheese.

And so they started to put annatto seed into the milk to make the cheese look more orange.

And to this day, we still do that.

Cheddar cheese is only orange because centuries ago cheesemakers were scamming their customers.

But that's not really the point of the story.

The point of the story is that Sun Basin Soap uses all natural ingredients.

That does not mean you can eat it.

If you kind of want to, I understand, but that would be a waste because this is the best soap I've ever used.

I care that it's made from a secret recipe of food grade oils right here in Montana.

I care that our packaging is beautiful and plastic free.

I care that all of the profit from Sun Basin Soap is donated to charity.

I care that right now we've got some screaming deals.