ocd much??? i never thought you would have finished this one, but you’ve proved me wrong. kudos

I’ll have to agree with Beau…OCD displayed in its finest fashion.  But, I’m glad someone out there had the patience to complete such a project, I know I would never have made it.  All the blue ones would be eaten, and the co-workers would have received half-full bags of brown M&M’s.

Is orange and blue dye less expensive than the others?

I did the same analysis way back in the 1980s when I was working at DEC. Very similar results. Used to really look forward to the packs with outliers, like 18 Greens. Gained 10 pounds during the testing, but that’s another story.

Josh, your sampling was flawed.  By using packs from the same box you ensured that they all would be the same lot and production is not a random process.  If the machine is mixing incorrectly, it will continue to mix incorrectly until someone adjusts it.  You need to sample different lots over a long period of time to generate a true population estimate.  If you purchased the 48 packs at 48 different locations, you could make valid claims.

By the way, I think I saw a documentary on making M&M’s once, and they make each color on a separate production line, color them at the end in a tumbler and mix the colors together later.

I suspect, with my little industry knowledge, that the design percentage (as we can see, not necessarily the actual percentage) of blue and brown M&M’s per package was decided based on product research; specifically, how comsumers ranked each color individually and how appealing the overall color mix was.

Say what you want about all M&M’s being the same, but I bet studies show differently. Your eyes are connected to your stomach.  Remember when they came out with different colored ketchup?  That didn’t go over so hot.  Brown M&M’s are boring.  Blue (a color rarely associated with food in the natural world) is exciting and fun. 

Greetings and salutations,

I’m a QC Line Inspector for a company that makes specialty grinding wheels.  I like your approach to analyzing the tantalizing question as to whether or not the Mars company is being totally honest with us about what their product actually contains.  What you did here is EXACTLY the kind of thing we do to determine the quality of our product.

I bet you exceeded the Mars company QC standards with your testing.  At the very least if you should need another day job they should be happy to offer you one.  If they don’t I’ll be happy to recommend you to my company.

You’re good.

My minor grievance with your testing procedure involves the last line in your presentation.  You stated:

“All packages were 1.69 ounces and were from the same 48-count box. This is the standard newspaper stand/vending machine size.”

That’s interesting from a Line QC position because of the aberrations between the number of M&M’s included in each bag vs. the weight of each bag.

A bag that has 57 M&M’s shouldn’t weigh the same as a bag containing 52, yet all bags are treated as weighing 1.69 oz.  Perhaps the unit measurement of an ounce isn’t the best resolution if a gram gives a finer gradient.

Perhaps you decided to give the Mars company the benefit of the doubt (a bad idea) and took their word that each bag weighed 1.69 oz without measuring the weight of each bag yourself.  And at the resolution of an ounce maybe 1.69 is close enough for government work, but is it really close enough for what your trying to do?

Perhaps, but considering the attention to detail you spent on this project you want to get it EXACTLY right and are willing to blow another twenty bucks (((?)do you get a rate for “professional” work? I love M&M’s)) on a “case” of M&M’s to do just that.

Overall I’d have to rate the work you’ve done as superlative.  It’s certainly on a par with what we do with millions of dollars at stake, and you’ve done this just for fun.

Let me know if I can help.  I love M&M’s. 

Rikonjohn

I can’t believe you’ve been doing this for three plus years!

Love to read about one other fool then our selfs. Thank you for making our day Josh. Here in the Netherlands there are just the usual M&M.
Lucky one of our sons live in the US, so we buy the special collections as there are for Halloween, Valentines day, Christmas and so on. And yes. Than back in Holland, we are doing our very very small research!
Enjoy your day, with or without M&M. Josh.

Interesting, Now that you have the observed and expected numbers of colors, you could statistically analyze the data o see if significant differences in color number exist (aka. is what is posted in their website the same as to what you found in your survey). You could do this by performing a chi square statistic.

I don’t see the one follow-up that the world really needs to know:  have you contacted M&M;‘s marketing department, and asked them for a comment?

Oh, Josh, I love that you did this project.  I think about color distribution every time I eat M&Ms, but I’ve never gone as far as carrying out a scientific study.
I love your site; I like knowing that there’s at least one other person “out there” who thinks about the minutiae of life like I do!

This one time, at math camp, this guy gave me some of his M&M’s. He shook the bag and out came 5 - each a different color. (Back then there was light brown, dark brown, yellow, green, and orange.)  I remarked that I wonder what are the odds of that happening. I was labeled at nerd - at math camp of all places! I am very happy to see your experiment.

uhhhh dude that made the site you may want to check the company’s numbers again because with the percents on here it equals up to 101% for the percent of each color.

The chi-squared analysis the the way to compare observed frequencies with expected frequencies. I can’t get to the M&M’s web site mentioned in your article. The only percent I could find was the preference percents.

thanks for doing this it helped my group a lot. we needed help with the whole “m&m’s ” thing.
so KUDOS!!!

Why are Yellow, Brown, Reg M&M’s so popular?

ive done a couple of experitments like this one ended up with the same out come.

i swear you have no life!

I am doing this project for my science fair project now in the 7th grade. I belive this project will help my brain mentally in math.

Hey, what did you do with the empty wrappers (vis-a-vis one of your other research projects)?

You have a lot of time on your hands