Oreo^® Project

Introduction

Oreo^® cookies are chocolate sandwich cookies with a white cream filling. The advertisements for Oreos say, “Oh, the kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo first and save the chocolate cookie outsides for last.” Seventh-grade students tested this hypothesis with kindergarten through second grade students.

Hypothesis

We went with the company’s slogan as our hypothesis, that students would take apart the cookie and eat the creamy middle first.

Method

Seventh-grade students shared cookies with kindergarten, first, and second grade students and observed how the children ate the cookies. The children were not told about the experiment, only that the seventh graders came to visit with a snack. The girls visited and ate cookies for 20-30 minutes.

Data

	Kindergarten Class 1	Kindergarten Class 2	First Grade	Second Grade
Middle first	8	2	6	7
Outside first	1	1	3	1
All at once	14	15	11	8
Two layers first	0	0	3	5
Total students	23	18	23	21

Kindergarten

1st

2nd

Conclusion

The most common way that kindergarten, first, and second grade students ate Oreos was all at once, biting through all three cookie layers at one time. The second most common way to eat Oreos was to eat the creamy middle layer. Students also ate the outside cookie layer first and the cream layer with a chocolate cookie layer. Therefore, the hypothesis was incorrect, as most kids did not eat the middle of the Oreo first.