M&Ms and their Colored Coatings
Photo by USA Today
Picture it: it is a Tuesday afternoon, and you are heading to your research lab. To demonstrate sampling distributions, the class uses M&Ms and their colored coatings. You are made to guess how many M&Ms in your fun-sized pack are each color, and as the lab continues, you learn that the colors are not evenly distributed. Imagine your surprise that day.
Go ahead and guess which M&M color you think is made the most. Was your guess based on personal experience? My guess was brown because I thought I saw brown the most often, and I thought it made the most sense since the chocolate, and the packaging is brown. It turns out that brown is NOT the most made color–it is the least!
We were all given fun packs of regular milk chocolate M&Ms and were asked to guess how many M&Ms were inside and how many each color there were. We were then comparing our packs of M&Ms to other classmates’. Based on their guess and their results, our predictions kept changing until we got the actual data.
Two factories make our beloved M&Ms: Cleveland and New Jersey. Each factory has different variations of color distribution. We compared our newest predictions to the factory distributions and guessed which factory made our M&Ms. We guessed New Jersey because their percentages were fairly similar to our predictions. The big bag which held our fun packs said which factory they were from on the back in small print, and we guessed correctly!
I went back to the data, however, because the results shocked me. It turns out that Cleveland’s color distribution data from 2017 are: 21% blue, 21% orange, 20% green, 14% yellow, 13% red, and 12% brown. New Jersey’s 2017 data revealed: 25% blue, 25% orange, 13% brown, 13% green, 13% red, and 13% yellow. WHY? Why do this instead of an even split of 16(ish)% across all six colors?
The Mars candy company has stated, “Our color blends were selected by conducting consumer preference tests, which indicate the assortment of colors that pleased the greatest number of people and created the most attractive overall effect…Each large production batch is blended to those ratios and mixed thoroughly. However, since the individual packages are filled by weight on high-speed equipment, and not by count, it is possible to have an unusual color distribution.”
The above statement helps explain why maybe blue and orange are made the most; it may very well be the case that they are probably the cheapest to get produced, too. When asked at the beginning of the lab to make our first set of predictions, we used personal experiences. The weight aspect of the packaging process gives a different assortment of colors for each M&M eating experience. This is another reason our first predictions were individually different and overall explains why sampling is important in research because larger samples give more accurate representations of an overall population.
