No, the artifical color is actually needed because there are many people that believe that products with brownish color have a lower nutrition because they are brownish. This occurs even with food that isn’t colored by artificial color. This is a food culture issue that is created by food that they eat as they grow up.

Try googling “shizuoka oden” and look at images that come up. You may think that this is a junk food because everything looks brown. But the coloring is just due to soy sauce based soup changing the color of whitish surimi/fish paste products and daikon-radish. So with the addition of a bowl of rice, it isn’t nutritionally different from eating sushi. Japanese people would eat “shizuoka oden” because they know the brown color doesn’t mean lower nutrition, but non-Japanese wouldn’t eat it and eat sushi instead based on the mistaken perception that colorful sushi is “healthier”.

Few hours of education aren’t going to change people into eating brown looking food. So coloring food with artificial or natural color would be greatly beneficial to making sure that people don’t dismiss food for just looking brown.