When I was a kiddo in the 80s, pistachios and other shelled nuts were commonly a winter holiday thing and I rarely ate whole nuts otherwise. I think peanuts, almonds and cashews are the exceptions, but they were almost always without shell. It’s been a few decades, but I remember having red and green (default, I guess, but maybe dyed green as well?) pistachios at Christmas and having to fight with the shells to get them out. They were the tastiest and I didn’t care much for walnuts, chestnuts or pecans.
Searching about ‘red pistachios’ also suggests it was a way to hide lower quality nuts. I’m not fully convinced about that, though, because I remember red dyed things tasting terrible as a kid. I don’t think most modern red food coloring tastes bad, but it used to. The amount of dye that made it on to the edible portion may not have affected the nut’s flavor too much, though.
All that to say: It could have been a marketing gimmick?
When I was a kiddo in the 80s, pistachios and other shelled nuts were commonly a winter holiday thing and I rarely ate whole nuts otherwise. I think peanuts, almonds and cashews are the exceptions, but they were almost always without shell. It’s been a few decades, but I remember having red and green (default, I guess, but maybe dyed green as well?) pistachios at Christmas and having to fight with the shells to get them out. They were the tastiest and I didn’t care much for walnuts, chestnuts or pecans.
Searching about ‘red pistachios’ also suggests it was a way to hide lower quality nuts. I’m not fully convinced about that, though, because I remember red dyed things tasting terrible as a kid. I don’t think most modern red food coloring tastes bad, but it used to. The amount of dye that made it on to the edible portion may not have affected the nut’s flavor too much, though.
All that to say: It could have been a marketing gimmick?