8 thoughts on “The Celebrations Experiment: The Results”

  1. Aha! I have an explaantion for why people think the rare ones are delicious!

    It’s because they’re rare that they’re more desirable, and thus percieved as more delicious. People would probably rate Oysters as more desirable than pizza, but thats only because they associate oysters with a rare and gourmet treat, and pizzas with run-of-the-mill. If pizza was really rare and oysters common I contend the deliciousness scale would be different!

    So I believe that if milky way and mars were less numerous in the tin they would be more desirable!

  2. That might have been true if my measure of popularity had come from the eBay results, but since they instead come from the ratings on ChocolateReview.co.uk of the widely-available high-street versions of these chocolates, I don’t think it is the case!

    That said, there could well be such an effect for the Galaxy Truffle and the Malteasers ‘teasers’, since they don’t seem to be available in any other form. But I think the results for the other chocolates are fairly clear.

  3. Masterfoods say “The mix is made up of different quantities of various brands. Research shows that’s what people prefer.” You could read that simply as meaning that people prefer different quantities of different brands. Which they plainly do, as some are perceived as more delicious than others. Masterfoods are saying that they deliver different quantities of different brands. They’re not necessarily saying that their distribution correlates to the customers’ preferred distribution!

    I agree with the Teasers analysis. They are different, and I prefer the Teasers variety to the Maltesers variety. I wonder if the spherical nature is the key to the expense? Teasers can easily be made with a conventional mould. I’m not sure how you’d make a Malteser shape easily in a manufacturing process. Wikipedia states “The exact manufacturing process is a trade secret.”

  4. Absolutely, that’s exactly how you could read it, but in the context it’s such a non-sequitur that it is very likely to be misread, which is why I describe it as disingenuous.

    Good point about the manufacturing difficulty of Maltesers (which I only now realise I have been misspelling all this time, I shall make corrections) – that seems very likely to be the reason for their relatively high cost-per-gram, and is a fascinating puzzle in its own right.

  5. Maltesers have been available since 1936, and in my mind at least have been largely identical throughout the time I’ve been aware of them (which is at least 30 years.) I would suggest that if it were any great manufacturing challenge to make spherical Maltesers rather than ovoid ones, then a) it would not have been practical to do so with 1936 technology and b) would have been the target of a revised design years ago.

    I would think that the ‘Teaser is so designed so that it fit within the Celebrations selection, in terms of size and density, rather than there being any kind of shortcut involved in its manufacturing.

  6. Apparently we’ve all been guilty of not reading the cited links on Wikipedia – there are a lot of fascinating suggestions about the manufacturing process here:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-6315,00.html

    I agree the ‘Teasers’ are designed to fit with the selection, but I think the interesting part is that it seems in so doing they have stumbled upon a potentially profitable new chocolate to sell independently, since the cost-per-gram would appear to be less than the inferred deliciousness.

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