One of the funny things about being me is that I like to count things. One day I picked up a pack of M&Ms (my favourite candy) and there were no yellows, no oranges, and no reds.
That started to make me wonder what the colour distribution of M&Ms was like. So, I started to count them, at first on paper, then in a spreadsheet.
Methodology:
Whenever I have bought a regular-sized (49 grams) bag of Peanut M&Ms, I would pour the contents out, and count them by colour and make note.
Predominantly, the M&Ms have come from stores within two kilometres of home. I did not include broken M&Ms in the count unless there was enough of the broken M&M to make up most (75%) of a M&M.
The data below is from the spreadsheet to ensure the freshest possible results and compare them to what official ratios (note: the link now goes to Archive.org after the M&M’s site has been re-organized) should be (thanks Fluffysphere ).
Average number of M&Ms per package:
Some Totals:
365 bags of M&Ms, containing 8,079 M&Ms, an average of 22.13 M&Ms per bag.
Brown: 962
Blue: 1,728
Green: 1,303
Yellow: 1,348
Orange: 1,749
Red: 989
If you are really are bored, you can look at all the colour information. The data is also available in CSV or Excel formats. I love hearing about how my data is being used, so please let me know!
we are doing this science fair project was just looking for information
Curiosity satisfied :-) Oh… and a good giggle at your total geekitude :-D
Hello Thomas,
I used your data in a project for Artificial Intelligence class. I applied Neural Network to predict if a bag contain a missing color. I am doing a Master in Applied Computer Science.
Thank you for sharing this data.
That’s excellent! Thank you for letting me know!