Happy Valentine’s Day! To celebrate we decided to bring a bag full of chocolate bars down to the Munsell Color Lab to have them determine the color notation for each. There were some interesting discoveries along the way…

• Color had a big effect on how people thought the chocolate would taste; they assumed the darker the chocolate the more bitter and the lighter the chocolate, the sweeter; that was not always the case.
• The 99% was bitter, rooty and earthy; the dark, rich intensity of the color matched the intensity of the flavor.
• The 42% Blood Orange won the favorite award; even one of the color analysts who is not a fan of chocolate liked it.
• The texture in the white chocolates affected the colors; the white coconut chocolate leaned towards a yellow hue, while the cookies and cream white was more grey or desaturated.
• The fruit in the chocolates also affected the color; for example, there was a purple hue in the chocolate with currants.
• It was interesting to see how the milk chocolates varied, the extra creamy color was in the same chroma as the classic, but its hue was more yellow.
• The cookies and cream flavored chocolate was challenging because of the two colors and how they combined to create other colors within the chocolate bar.

With 5 people on the color team and 8 bars of chocolate to color test and of course taste test, you can do the math and figure out it was a good day in the lab.

Did you get a box of chocolates this Valentine’s Day? If so, what was the color notation? Did it match any in our test?

 

 

 

 

Posted by Albert Munsell.