Colorants are widely used in food industry to improve appearance of edible products. This work present a method for the determination of two colorants, tartrazine and allura red, with UV‐Vis spectrophotometry and MCR‐ALS using only five standards for calibration and the correlation constraint. MCR‐ALS is usually applied in second‐order data but it rarely has been used for first order data, for which is more usual the use of PLS. In this case, MCR‐ALS applied to first order data can show some advantages like interference identification and the use of a reduced calibration matrix. Using this methodology, the relative errors obtained are below 0.28%, correlation coefficients are above 0.99 and the calculated LOD and LOQ are 0.26 and 0.80 mg L‐1 for allura red and 0.70 and 2.11 mg L‐1 for tartrazine respectively. The procedure has been successfully applied to some food dyes and other liquid commercial products and, compared to HPLC analysis, no significant differences were found in the results. Recovery values obtained at two spiked levels were between 92.0% and 106.7% except for a sample.