Starting Dec. 1, shoppers may notice some Doritos and Cheetos on supermarket shelves look a little different. Instead of bright orange and almost neon yellow, customers can now buy a more "pale" version of these crunchy snacks.

PepsiCo is calling the new product line “Naked” because it doesn't contain artificial flavors or dyes. The company is still going to make the original ones, too. Because when grocery retailers offer up something fancy and new, they still have to keep the customer base for the tried-and-true.

When Marion Nestle first heard the news of the dye-free Doritos, she laughed.

Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at New York University, and author of several books, including “What to Eat Now,” said she’s seen this move before.

“Food companies are not social service agencies and they're not public health agencies. They're businesses with stockholders to please, and their first priority is maximizing sales and profits to their stockholders,” she said.

Just because consumers say they want an option doesn’t mean they’ll actually buy it.

“We’ve seen it time and time again, especially with healthier foods,” said food analyst Phil Lempert at Supermarket Guru. “When Campbell Soup reduced the amount of sodium that they had in some of their soups, people stopped buying it.” 

Because, he said, it wasn’t mm-mm-good.

So Campbell’s started offering consumers a choice: the regular soup or the low sodium version. 

By offering the alternative alongside the original, brands are able to hedge their bets and appeal to more consumers.

Though Blake Droesch, senior research analyst at eMarketer, said this strategy comes with some risk to the core brand.

“The risk is that by introducing a dye-free version, you're directly calling attention to the fact that your existing products have unhealthy components in them,” he said.

But, he said, the payoff could be that customers see these products not so much as occasional junk food but, instead, as staples for, say, kids’ lunches everyday.