Is Red a Flavour?

Ahhhhh novelty, one of the key ingredients in any great treat. Well at least sometimes it can be. I've noticed a new novel trend lately and I'm not too sure how to deal with it. Several companies have been creating red flavoured treats, not cherry or fruit punch but "red flavoured". It's important that we make sure somebody doesn't know something I don't, so I'm going to make some assumptions and if you know differently please let me know and I will retract my statement. Orange is both a fruit and a flavour, so we write off the bat have established a "gray area". Grape, Lemon, and Pineapple, although with some exceptions (when it comes to house paints) are fruit and not colours. Purple, Yellow and Red as far as I know are colours. Wait a minute, is red a flavour too?

I have to be honest, when I was a kid I would never ask for the cherry or fruit punch popsicle, I would ask for the red popsicle. Having said that, on the package it is clearly marked as cherry. So in saying this it could mean one of two things; either everybody used this "red" as a description for the popsicle and I was just using the colloquialism for the product, or I was the only person in the world doing this and I'm either an idiot or a creative genius. Well now that we know where it came from, let's look at whether or not you should just label a candy "red favoured".

I think it's all right sometimes. For example, if you attach another word with it, like berry. Nothing wrong with Berry Red, in fact I believe it's a Kool Aid flavour. I guess this isn't a good example though because it does imply the flavour by the terms in the average English language. It could be that some products are trying, rather than sell the taste, they want to sell the colour. It is a fact that people generally buy candy and treats when it has a lot of red on the package, but it's really a strange way to sell something.

I guess I'm not really hip to the idea of candy being labelled by colour instead of flavour. Although I've tried many of the "red flavoured" treats and you know what, they tasted red. Some I could place like a cherry or fruit punch, but some just tasted red. So what flavour is it and why is it so dam good.