About a month ago, Mr. Beast announced the launch of his Feastables chocolate bar. And in case you're feeling like you've deja'd this voo, I should clarify that he's re-launching his chocolate bar with a brand new formula. And this time around, he doesn't want it to just taste better than Hershey's chocolate. He wants it to be THE BEST ON EARTH! He did a whole video about it and everything. Had a skit. Good structure. Honestly, 10 out of 10. But then, he finished it off showing a taste test, whi
ch set off all sorts of food theory alarms. Why? Because it was impossible for Feastables to lose. Hello, internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the richest tasting food show with a brand new formula. Now, I'm not exactly someone with the biggest sweet tooth. But when Mr. Beast announced his brand new chocolate bars, I figured I'd try them out. Especially because in classic YouTube clickbait fashion, he said it's the BEST TASTING CHOCOLATE EVER MADE BY MANKIND! Admittedly, when I compared them to his
old bars, yeah, they definitely tasted better and more chocolatey. But the best tasting chocolate bar ever? Ever ever? Ever ever? That's a pretty bold claim. He decided he would try and back it up and prove that his chocolate was the best, though, through a blind taste test. So I set up a random warehouse, where I'm going to invite hundreds of strangers to do a blind taste test on our brand new chocolate. Now, I love a good food experiment. And we're no strangers to taste tests on this channel,
but seeing Feastables come out on top so handedly... Another one. Back to back to back to back. ...made me want to take a closer look at the whole thing. As I watched the video, I noticed something. Everything from the placement of the chocolates to the order in which they were eaten was designed to get Feastables to be the winner. While the contestants may have had no clue which chocolate was which, Jimmy's team made the experiment so that it would essentially be fail-proof in Feastables' favo
r. And after the fact, they made it pretty difficult for us to double check their work when it came to what they actually revealed in the video itself. Pretty suspicious, if you ask me. Am I saying that Mr. Beast, THE Jimmy Donaldson, deliberately set up the test so that his chocolate would win? Actually, no. Let me be clear. I'm not trying to dunk on Jimmy. At least not in my third week of being host. His team, though? Fair game. And while Jimmy was probably busy catapulting sports cars into th
e horizon or something, I'm sure that this test was designed by his team so that Feastables couldn't lose. But here's the thing. They may not have done it all on purpose. In fact, they may have unknowingly skewed the results of the experiment in their favor. So, did Mr. Beast accidentally make it so that Feastables couldn't fail in this test? That, my friends, is what I'm going to find out today. First off, why did Mr. Beast do a blind taste test at all? Was that just a random idea his team came
up with? No.
Blind taste tests are something food companies do all the time. They do this so they can collect data and compare it to similar products or competitors. When removing any branding, packaging, or anything like that, the thought is it takes away any bias or favoritism someone might have toward a particular brand and allow them to judge solely on the taste. Probably the most famous example of this was the Pepsi challenge back in 1983. That year, Pepsi ran an advertising campaign where
they went to supermarkets across America asking them to blind taste test Pepsi and their biggest competitor, Coca-Cola, who before this test was the choice for sodas. What's shocking is that the underdog Pepsi came out on top and showed that a giant like Coke could in fact bleed. Pepsi obviously advertised this amazing result. Coca-Cola was outraged by this. They started issuing press releases questioning the validity of Pepsi's taste test and actually tried to sue Pepsi. But this blind taste t
est showed that branding isn't everything and sometimes it can actually cloud our judgment. Pepsi's market share more than doubled from 6% to 14% showing that people had probably overlooked it in favor of Coke up until that point. But you know what hasn't been overlooked? All of you that responded to our community post a couple of weeks ago showing your excitement for our upcoming episodes. And for those of you chomping at the bit for the microwave episode, don't worry, that's coming up next wee
k. So make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss that or future episodes where we break down whether party size or family size or a massive scam or even the famed gargling episode. I promise you though, it'll be one that you don't want to miss. But back to today's topic. If you haven't seen the video, Jimmy set out four different chocolates with no branding or labeling convention of any sort for the participants. Going up against Feastables were Lindt, the pricey Icelandic chocolat
e and Cadbury. An odd and suspicious choice made by them is that not all the chocolates were the same. While Feastables, Icelandic and Cadbury were milk chocolate, Lindt seemed to be 75% dark. What? That is a huge difference in flavor profile. It's like adding in a Sprite when you're doing a cola taste test. Every round had the chocolates set out in the same order in front of the testers. And judging from the participants referring to Feastables as the first chocolate, we can also assume they at
e them in the same order from left to right. Now, this brings up a point I want to tackle first. We don't actually know the design of the test and we have to go by what were presented in the video. And to be clear, this is absolutely a knock against the whole experiment. We as the audience are sort of just expected to take what we see at face value without any further details, which leads me to the second point. And that is that there are no statistics for us to look at. We don't know how many p
eople tested the chocolate and we don't know what percentage of them actually chose Feastables. The video shows most of the people voting for Feastables, but that may not be the whole story. Maybe he figured it was a quick video and he didn't have to show any numbers, but here at Food Theory, we need the numbers. We live on cold, hard facts. But even with that aside, I noticed something else about the taste test. The way the chocolates were presented on that table actually had a huge effect on t
he results. The first big thing comes from the fact that many of us naturally focus on things to our left because of how we read. That's right. The way we read causes us to bring more attention to things on the left of our field of view. This psychological study, which holds the title for the most boring name, exploring something so cool, conducted an experiment to prove this left side bias. You know what? Actually, you can see this for yourself. On screen right now, you'll see two circles, A an
d B. Now, because English speakers read left to right, your attention will first go to circle A. Then, your brain will quickly shift your attention to the right, to circle B, because that's the direction you normally read in. But when you shift your attention back to circle A, your brain hesitates because it sort of says, I've checked there already. What are you doing, you idiot? But this causes it to linger on that left side longer, creating an unconscious favoritism toward anything on that sid
e. We know it's linked to the way we read because the same test was conducted on Arabic-speaking people who read right to left, and they found the exact opposite bias. They favored the right-hand side. What this means for the taste test is that people's attention would naturally have been geared toward the far-left chocolate, Feastables. Not only did it mean that throughout the experiment, people's focus would have stayed on this chocolate, but if you watch the video, you'll see that most people
actually chose it first. This opens up a Pandora's box of unconscious bias and unfair favoritism toward Jimmy's chocolate, namely in the forms of the primacy and anchoring biases. The primacy bias is a psychological tendency to prioritize information that's presented first in a sequence. This happens because we get more time to process the information, which then leads to people giving more weight to the thing they encounter first and giving less importance to the things that come after. In thi
s case, the first chocolate, Feastables, would leave a stronger impression in the minds of the participants, skewing their judgment in favor of it as the one to beat. It's kind of like love at first sight or first taste. Yeah, you get the point. Once that primacy bias is established, the next thing that happens is your brain creates an anchoring bias. Anchoring bias basically means that our brains tend to anchor our decisions based on the first piece of information we receive, even if that infor
mation is irrelevant or just straight up wrong. This may sound similar to primacy bias, but there is some nuance here. See, primacy bias causes you to potentially obtain a skewed, heightened opinion of the first chocolate you taste, whereas anchoring bias makes that the yardstick by which you measure every other chocolate. You essentially latch onto a piece of information that then influences everything else. In the video, we hear participants talk about the richness of the chocolate. It's a lit
tle bit richer than the other one. This may have been the anchor for many of them. So they try the others and think, hmm, this one wasn't as rich as the first one, or this one was way too rich compared to that first one. Either way, their thoughts always came back to the anchor, which was Feastables. But Jedi mind tricks weren't the only way that Jimmy hacked this test. Mr. Beast's chocolate being eaten first by the participants gave it another leg up, or should I say tongue up when it comes to
how our taste buds work. When we consume something sweet, our taste buds naturally become suppressed and the sensitivity of that taste decreases. This makes everything after that first sample taste less sweet. Like I mentioned earlier, testers in the video kept saying things like Feastables was richer or sweeter than the others. But that's always gonna be the case because the taste buds for sweetness have become more suppressed after the first chocolate. So the others won't appear as sweet in re
lation. This is called sensory adaptation. Our taste buds adapt to the sweet flavor and are less sensitive to others appearing to be much blander. That's exactly what we're seeing in this blind taste test. And by the way, this can happen across all senses. Have you ever noticed how you can be jamming in the car at full volume like it's nobody else's business and you don't realize that you've cranked it up all the way, but then the next time you get in your car, you turn it on and it's so loud. T
hat is sensory adaptation. During your first ride, your ears become accustomed to the loud volume. They get fatigued and adapt to be less responsive to sound. Then after some time passes where you don't listen to things at eardrum rupturing levels, when you turn your car on, you're more sensitive to sound and the exact same thing happens with our taste buds, except it happens even faster. It's worth mentioning that this is not where you become numb to certain flavors due to overconsumption over
a long period. That's entirely different. We're just talking about the fast initial adaptation to our taste buds after eating something. Every element of the taste test skewed the results in favor of feastables coming out on top. And I have a hard time believing it was all inadvertent. The choice of chocolates was definitely more than suspicious. For one, poor old Hershey's kept getting name-checked and wasn't even put in the taste test. How are you going to do them dirty like that? You say your
new formula makes your chocolate the best tasting ever made by mankind, but you don't put it up against the most popular brand in America? That's just poor experimental design, Jimmy. Speaking of bad design, I mentioned that not all the chocolates were the same kind, but now taking everything we've learned, the left-to-right bias we talked about would make it so that this dark chocolate was guaranteed to be tried straight after Feastables, which would increase the bitterness of dark chocolate a
nd create a greater contrast, amplifying the primacy and anchoring biases. In the participants' minds, their opinion of the first chocolate would skyrocket even more thanks to the bitter taste in their mouths after the second, making it another anchor. So basically, for the rest of the chocolates, they'd say, well, it's not as bad as the second, but the first one was better. Mr. Beast used everything from the choice of chocolate to their placements in order to essentially hack the testers' minds
and bodies so that feastables would be the winner. But I don't want to just tear apart his taste test. In fact, I decided to put his chocolate where my mouth is and conduct my own improved taste test with the help of some familiar faces from Team Theorist. I had to wrangle them and convince them they wouldn't be eating Christmas tree, but I finally got Josiah, Rachel, Ash, and Lee to be my taste testers for four chocolates. And this time around, we tagged in Hershey's milk chocolate and swapped
out Icelandic for it. Oh, and Lindt, we switched over to its milk chocolate version so that all the brands could at least be the same type of chocolate. In order for them to not be able to see which chocolate was which, I blindfolded them to avoid anyone making any assumptions based on looks. And it was a little bit for me because it was hilarious watching them just fumble around for their water and the saltines and the chocolates. I could have just handed everything to them, but this was way b
etter. And to combat the anchoring and primacy bias even further, everyone went through and tested the chocolates twice. In between each round, we rearranged the order so that they could give a fair assessment of the chocolate they tried first. And to ensure that sensory adaptation was kept to a minimum, each one of my testers paused and took a break with some water and saltines in between each brand in order to give their taste buds a break and reset. That way, each chocolate they tried was don
e on fresh, well-rested taste buds. At the end of each round, they ranked their chocolates from favorite to least favorite so that we could see once and for all if Feastables would come out on top. With everything equal, the results were actually pretty surprising. Turns out there might be a reason why Mr. Beast didn't initially include Hershey's chocolate in his taste test. In eight total rounds, Hershey's came in first place in four of them and second place in another two. Josiah was the only
one with a blind hatred of Hershey's chocolate. That one, like, tastes like berries for some reason. That's weird. In last place is plate number three. While Ash, on the other hand, might have found their calling as the new Hershey's spokesperson. Yes, absolutely. That one right there. Oh, it smacks. It's thick and it stays with you. And that's perfect. It's not overpowering with the milkiness. It's right where you want it to be. And it's comforting. It's so comforting. Oh, yes! I'm so excited.
Because it rocks, dude. Cadbury and Lindt were a bit more all over the place, snagging some first place picks, some last place picks, and a few in between. But the most shocking result was that Feastables never earned anything higher than a third place ranking. And then three. Three, third place. Two is three. The first plate you tried was your last place pick. Yeah. Okay, cool. And came dead last half the time. So there you have it. When the testing field was equal and the position of the choco
lates rearranged so that Feastables wouldn't be strategically placed, it couldn't take the heat and ended up melting. But that's not to say its reformulated chocolate is bad. What this does tell us is that the taste tests don't reveal the full picture of a product's success. What Mr. Beast shows us in his video doesn't actually prove anything about his chocolate because it doesn't remove all the biases and adaptations our brains make over the course of a taste test. In fact, he used them to his
advantage, setting up the test so that, at least subconsciously, all his participants would prefer Feastables over anything else. And when we removed as much of that as possible, his arch-nemesis Hershey's came to take the throne. So when it comes to whether or not it's the best chocolate ever made by mankind, his taste test was way too flawed to determine whether the new Feastables are the sweet treat that raises the bar or just a chocolate down. But hey, that's just a theory. A food theory. Bo
n appétit.
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