Dunkin’ Donuts has removed all artificial dyes from its doughnuts, nearly one year ahead of schedule, as the company continues to work to find replacements for synthetic coloring in its other menu items.

Rick Golden, Manager of Donut Excellence for Dunkin’ Brands, announced the news on Thursday, saying that “bright, colorful confections” are a hallmark of Dunkin’s doughnut lineup. The colors will remain, but the artificial colorings will be gone.

Last year, Dunkin’ announced it planned to drop artificial colors. The target date was the end of 2018. That’s still the goal for frozen drinks, other baked goods and breakfast sandwiches — but the doughnuts went au naturel, as it were, a little early.

“Our biggest challenge was replacing the artificial dyes in donuts with fruit juices and other extracts while balancing the flavor profile and bright colors,” Golden wrote. “It took years of research and development to get it just right.”

Some items used as toppings or decoration may still contain synthetic dyes, the company notes.

Dunkin’ is the latest in a long line of food companies to replace artificial colors with naturally derived dyes, which can be more expensive and more difficult to consistently produce. (Meanwhile, some perfectly natural colorings, like a red dye made from crushed insects, have also been known to ick out consumers.)

In 2015, General Mills announced it would be coloring Trix cereal with dyes made from the spices turmeric and annatto, as well as fruit and vegetable juices, instead of the old artificial options. Nestle re-did the recipes for 75 different candy bars to eliminate artificial flavors and colors. Panera boasted that it was dropping 150 different additives, including artificial colors.

Food dyes have been a particular target for advocates against artificial food additives, partly because they serve no health purpose, and partly because of specific concerns about their effect on children.

As NPR’s Allison Aubrey has previously explained:

“Some parents, including the sponsor of a petition aimed at getting dyes out of candies, believe that artificial colorings in food can contribute to hyperactivity in their children.

“But the evidence to back this claim is mixed. ‘I think there’s a growing body of research that shows that artificial food colorings can affect a child’s behavior,’ Andrew Adesman, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told us. ‘On the other hand, these effects are relatively modest.’

“And, he adds, there’s no evidence that artificial dyes pose long-term safety or health risks.

“Adesman says it’s good that the food industry is giving parents more options to buy products that are free of these artificial ingredients. But he points out that eliminating artificial dyes does not turn chocolate bars into health foods.

” ‘They [can be] high in fat and in sugar,’ Adesman says — two things many of us could stand to cut back on.”

The same, alas, is true of doughnuts.

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The Dow Jones industrial average finished above 25,000 for the first time, as the long rally in stock prices showed no signs of letting up.

A strong report about hiring from payroll processor ADP helped push stocks higher. Financial stocks did especially well, and an increase in oil prices has benefited the energy sector.

The Dow finished the day at 25,075, a gain of 0.61 percent. Both the Nasdaq composite index and the Standard and Poor’s 500 index also finished at record highs.

Last year turned out to be the best for the market since 2013, with the Dow climbing more than 25 percent. It rose 4,000 points over the last 10 months.

“It was the first year in history where you saw every single month up,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab.

Sonders attributes much of the surge in prices to broad economic factors, including low interest rates and healthy growth.

“I think the turn in earnings and the strength in global growth was enough to propel the market, and then the longer-term story has been just massive liquidity, courtesy of the central banks,” she added.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks for years funneled extra money into the economy through a process known as quantitative easing, to stimulate growth. They have also kept interest rates low, although lately they have begun to reverse course.

Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says the expectation of a large corporate tax cut and deregulatory efforts by the Trump administration probably played a part in last year’s rally.

Four days into the New Year, prices have continued to barrel ahead.

Earlier this week, the Nasdaq composite index finished above 7,000 for the first time, and the broader Standard and Poor’s 500 index also set a record.

But no rally lasts forever, and the prospect of higher interest rates could put the brakes on this one.

“We think the economy will be a little bit stronger, juiced a little bit by tax cuts, but we are getting later on in that cycle. Maybe we’re in the eighth inning or so,” said Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

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When it comes to reporting on Spotify and the company’s strained relationship with songwriters and publishers, it’s beginning to sound like a broken … system. But a possible fix is in.

Just two days before New Year’s Eve, the music publishing company Wixen, which manages the compositions of a wide cross section of artists from Neil Young to Rage Against The Machine, filed a lawsuit against Spotify over its failure to properly license those works before making them available to stream.

The new lawsuit is not the first (or the second or the third) brought against the world’s most popular streaming service over compositions, which are legally discrete from recordings and require a separate license (a “mechanical”). In fact, Wixen’s action is directly related to a $43 million settlement that Spotify struck six months ago over a largely identical suit against it that it hoped would sunset further court battles.

“Unfortunately, the Ferrick settlement,” reads Wixen’s complaint, referring to that agreement last year, “is still grossly insufficient to compensate songwriters and publishers for Spotify’s actions, as well as procedurally unjust.” It seeks a “total statutory award of at least $1.6 billion.” That language closely mirrors that of another legal action, brought against Spotify one month after the Ferrick settlement was announced.

The timing of the suit is inauspicious for Spotify — Wednesday it reportedly filed papers with the SEC for an initial listing on the stock exchange some time in the first half of this year.

While the reason for the suit isn’t new, the reason for its as-late-in-the-year-as-you-can-get filing is. If that settlement didn’t quite protect Spotify against lawsuits like Wixen’s (songwriters and publishers can opt out of the Ferrick deal) then a new piece of legislation will — and it’s the reason the company is going after Spotify now.

On Dec. 21, 2017, Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia introduced that new piece of bipartisan legislation, which makes sweeping changes to the labyrinthine licensing system for compositions that has left many songwriters in the lurch and tech companies on the hook. It would also prevent lawsuits like Wixen’s from being filed.

“It’s the Music Modernization Act, and the Jan. 1 deadline it imposes forced our clients’ hands,” Daniel Schacht of Donahue Fitzgerald LLP, the firm handling Wixen’s case, tells NPR of the Dec. 29 filing.

“We’ve been working on this now for a little over 4 1/2 years,” Collins said in an interview with NPR conducted on Dec. 20. “We’re trying to provide a way so that [digital services] can provide the music they want to, have a safe haven where they can match the royalties, where the songwriters can also benefit — that they can get fairly compensated. It’s really is a product of a lot of hard work to reach a consensus. I have to admit, there were times during the journey that I would have — that I’d just throw up my hands and not find the answer.”

The Music Modernization Act establishes, among many other things, what tech companies, songwriters and publishers have needed but failed to create for some time: a central database that identifies which songwriter and/or publisher controls which composition. (A bill introduced late last summer by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., also attempted to address the database issue but was not taken seriously by the stakeholders involved.)

That database, while long needed, has never been created — or really even come close — mostly owing to its cost and disagreements about control of the proprietary information that would have to be held within it.

“It allows the digital service providers to have a central place to go for not only paying royalties,” Collins says, “but protects songwriters from them using things they shouldn’t be. But also, to give songwriters a place where they can be confident that they’re going to be compensated as well.”

To accomplish this, tech companies would foot the bill for its creation in exchange for a blanket license that would cover the compositions within it, helping them pay the songwriters who control those works.

Digital services “will basically be indemnified, where they will not be able to be sued, which is something that songwriters and publishers had to give them — with all these things, it’s all quid pro quo,” Michael Eames, president of the Association of Independent Music Publishers, tells NPR. Eames says that organizations like his, which represents smaller music publishers, could benefit from the bill. “We’re having to monitor and police our data in multiple databases through multiple vendors in order to get paid. It’s difficult, to say the least.”

The bill was drafted after consultation with industry groups that represent the major stakeholders involved, including the National Music Publishers Association, the Digital Media Association (which represents services like Spotify), ASCAP and BMI (the two leading performance-rights organizations) and the Nashville Songwriters Association International, among others. All support its passage.

However, Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes issued a letter the day of the bill’s introduction detailing his organization’s doubts around the new law. Among his concerns:

… serious fairness, transparency and practical issues related to the proposed processes of setting up the licensing collective, the distributing of unidentified monies on a market share basis and the need to better protect music creator economic rights in that context, the vague nature of any opt-out mechanisms, the granting of relief from statutory damages liability to prior willful infringers, the scope of the musical composition database (including songwriter/composer information), the provisions concerning shortfall and other funding aspects of the collective, the absence of direct distribution of royalties by the collective to songwriters and composers, the vague nature of the audit activities to be optionally conducted by the collective, and the complications in that and other regards raised by obvious conflicts of interest issues.

Spotify declined to comment on both the Music Modernization Act and Wixen’s lawsuit. But considering its forthcoming public listing, it will have to assuage investors’ worries over a seemingly endless parade of litigation. Apple was sued on Dec. 28 over the same issue.

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