A GRAND CHOCOLATE TASTING

THE GRAND (BLIND)
CHOCOLATE TASTING

That's a lot of chocolate!

Hello everyone! Last Sunday I managed to pull off (in a week's notice so that's cool!) a grand blind chocolate tasting with my friends! I'm still baffled how quickly we actually managed to organize this but hey, everything counts, right?

Nonetheless, let's discuss the matter at hand. What did we do, how did we do it and how it all went? I also made some neat excel sheets of the final results as well.

Luckily I realized to cut them into small pieces before hand :D

The idea was quite simple. Get a bunch of people over at my place, make them taste ("blind") pieces of regular market brand chocolates (so none of the fancy/overly expensive/weirdly flavored ones) in two rounds (so the first answer needn't be one's "final answer"), guess (or know) which chocolate they had and finally give the chocolate a score between 1-10. Also had three dark chocolate brands in this test to see if everyone would recognize them among the milk chocolates.

Please don't mix these, please don't mix these!!!

The chocolates were (in alphabetical order); also seen as the first picture here

1. Bellarom milk chocolate
2. Fazer milk chocolate (blue label)
3. Fazer dark chocolate (brown label)
4. Fazer light milk chocolate (red label)
5. Fin Carré dark chocolate
6. Fin Carré milk chocolate
7. Marabou milk chocolate
8. Milka milk chocolate
9. Panda milk chocolate
10. Panda dark chocolate (in Finnish dark = tumma thus comes after "m")

The setting

I deduced that Milka, Fazer (blue label) and/or Marabou (market leaders) would probably be the "easiest" to recognize so the only way to "mess" with the participants is to modify the order to confuse them. You'll see the final order when I show you the results

Carefully placing a piece in a cup

Chocolate tasting, SERIOUS BUSINESS

I even went so far to place a little "lid" on each cup and asked everyone to just chug the piece of chocolate in their mouths. Because pretty much each brand has its name carved on an individual piece and one could easily figure out the brand by just looking at it as well. So participant honesty was asked and well received! :)

Hey, no chocolate in there!!

After the first round, we had a small break, ate something salty and prepared ourselves for the next and final round. If anyone had doubts, they could now fix it. 

Notice the #8, a little doubt goes a long way

As the tasting was finally over and people were feeling doozy of all the chocolate they ate (even with a small amount it felt like a lot), I brewed some well-deserved coffee, scrambled the answer sheets and gave each one someone else's paper. I then proceeded in telling everyone the correct order and people graded the papers accordingly.

I'm guessing he knows the correct answer?

and the final results were...

*drum fill*

Marjukka 7/10!

Mikko, Tuomas, Hennariikka 6/10

Antti 5/10

Markus, Karoliina 3/10

Winner (Marjukka) and a joint 2nd place (Tuomas, Hennariikka & Mikko)

The winner takes it all!

As life is full of surprises, Marjukka was awarded with a Kinder egg! :D :D :D

THE COMPLETE RESULTS

I'm not even mad that this picture kind of breaks from the side. It was all part of my grand scheme! So let's break down the numbers and I'll also try to explain how to "read" the charts. Should be quite straightforward, though. After the name you'll see their answer and regarding its color you'll notice if it was correct or not. The score column next to the chocolate mentioned before (1-10), meaning one brand could receive a maximum of 70 points. The competition was actually quite tight! A joint winner was nonetheless found! 

Fazer (blue label) & Bellarom milk with a whopping 55/70 points! Moreover, not so impressively, Fin Carré dark was the only chocolate to receive less than 40 points and lost the competition with a meager 37 points. But when comparing the other brands they are all withing ~15 points with no "big" exception in point division.

People knew their dark chocolates. Markus & Tuomas were the only ones confusing Fin Carré's dark with Panda's dark and everyone knew Fazer's dark (brown label) and I am glad of that! Surprisingly though, Marabou was only known by two (Marjukka & Tuomas) and Fazer (blue label) (Finland's #1 sold chocolate) by less than half of the participants!

But if anyone else has found their own points of interests, do ellaborate! I found this tasting to be extremely fun and just pure awesome! Do enjoy the final gallery!

GALLERY

(quite a small one :D)