Don’t be alarmed next year if your Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is a little less yellow than you and your kids are used to. Recently, the company announced it will begin using spices instead of artificial dyes to color select Mac & Cheese varieties sold throughout the country, CNN reports.

The decision follows a nationwide petition on Change.org to ditch the Yellow No. 5 and Yellow No. 6 dyes in the company’s signature line of U.S.-brand noodle. The petition racked up more than 348,000 signatures.

Several studies linked the consumption of these additives to hyperactivity, asthma, skin conditions and cancer in children. In Europe, Kraft stopped using the dyes after a law required the company to put warning labels on all their boxes. But in the United States, Kraft hasn’t followed suit because there are still no such legal requirements here.

Starting in 2014, Kraft will swap out food dyes and use paprika and beta-carotene in SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Halloween and winter holiday-shaped pastas. But the dyes will remain in the company’s iconic elbow-shaped macaroni boxes.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, lauded the decision but said he was “puzzled” as to why Kraft was not changing all of its products. “As Kraft has shown, it is clearly possible to make macaroni and cheese without these harmful chemicals,” Jacobson said.

Kraft spokeswoman Lynne Galia responded by saying, “Making ingredient changes isn’t as simple as it would seem.”

But parents can pressure Kraft to drop these food additives. To sign the petition online, click here. For more information on how food additives trigger behavioral changes in children, click here.