For those of you boycotting Starbucks over the red dye made from crushed bugs it's been using, this Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino® is for you.

By June, this drink will be bug-free, Starbucks says

As we reported last month, vegetarians and others who'd rather not eat insects protested when they found out the the company uses cochineal, the red "juice" a tiny white bug called Dactylopius coccus exudes when crushed, to color certain food and drinks.

Today, Starbucks President Cliff Burrows announced the company would color the coffee chain's goods with a popular, non-controversial vegetable extract instead.


"Our expectation is to be fully transitioned to lycopene, a natural, tomato-based extract, in the strawberry sauce (base) used in our Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino® blended beverage and Strawberry Banana Smoothie," Burrows wrote on the company blog.

It will not look much different and will still meet company taste standards, a spokesman tells The Salt.

Starbucks will also be phasing cochineal out of afternoon delights like Raspberry Swirl Cake, Birthday Cake Pop, Mini Donut with pink icing, and Red Velvet Whoopie Pie by the end of June.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' David Byer, who pushed for the switch, praised Starbucks' announcement. "It will soon be Starbucks Vegan Strawberry Frapps all 'round at PETA headquarters in celebration," he says.

While the red-dyed products likely make up a small portion of the coffee chain's business — the company doesn't publicly break out product-by-product sales, says a Starbucks' spokesman — in the food world, it's all about optics.

"Our commitment to you, our customers, is to serve the highest quality products available. As our customers you expect and deserve better – and we promise to do better," Burrows writes.

Despite the ick factor, cochneal extract is FDA approved and widely seen as a more natural alternative to, say, petroleum-based Red Dye #40 - an argument many pointed out in the comments on our previous post.

But, as they say, the customer is always right. And if the customer doesn't want bugs, Starbucks, for one, is responding.

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After the first batch of high school students graduate from the Department of Education’s new Kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) program, some college programs will be shortened and first among these are engineering courses, Commission on Higher Education (CHED) chairperson Patricia Licuanan said Friday.

Licuanan said the CHED engineering technical panel "has decided" to cut short the five-year engineering programs to four years, but "some of the science technical committees, however, have categorically said their programs cannot be shortened."

According to CHED estimates, some 322,000 students will enroll in engineering and technology programs for school year 2012-2013.

The country's colleges and universities produce about 48,000 to 49,000 engineering graduates yearly, CHED data show.

Last month, DepEd Secretary Armin Luistro revealed in a meeting of the Philippine Business for Education that college courses will become shorter because of the curricular changes in basic education under the K-12 program.

Licuanan clarified though that the proposal to shorten college courses did not come from CHED, but from its technical panels of experts who come from stakeholder sectors.

She said the changes in college degree courses "will be the product of long and intense discussions and that comments made or ideas floated during the discussions must not be interpreted as definite plans."

She confirmed previous reports that the technical panel on general education (GE) "has initially proposed a shorter GE curriculum as some GE courses will now be part of Grades 11 and 12." —VS, GMA News