The info in the 1976 Straight Dope Classic How did they figure out the M&M color mix? must be pretty dated. I don’t remember the proportions ever being that lopsided–really, two of the colors making up 90% of the bag?–and certainly it’s not the case now. Checking a bag of plain M&Ms containing 60 candies, I find:
14 orange
13 blue
11 brown
11 yellow
6 green
5 red
Allowing for individual variation (my sample size being only one bag), I’d guess that today’s mix is 20% each orange, blue, brown, and yellow, and 10% each red and green.
Innerestin’. It is a column from 1976, as you note. We don’t have the staff or resources to update “classic” columns – occasionally, some staffer will note some major event or significant change, but not often. Some of the older columns were updated when they were published in book form, as well. But generally, the old columns are what they are. Er, what they were.
I tried this with the kid when she was 9 as a method of teaching ratios and hopefully constructing a letter to the company asking about those selections. I believe I read from them that they have a formula that they chose depending on market conditions. When they introduce a new color(rarely), they watch closely in test markets. We did not buy enough bags to do a valid test. The kid kept losing count and eating the test material.
I don’t know about other areas of the country, but amongst junior high school students (not pre-schoolers) in the PNW where I grew up, the green M&Ms were alleged to have aphrodesiac qualities. Either that, or picking out and eating the green ones was supposed to be a signal that you were horny.
Silly, silly, silly.
As for the orange ones topping Biffy the Elephant Shrew’s list, I read in recent years that orange is lately considered a good color for marketing purposes, so that may have something to do with it, if it wasn’t just random chance.
I see I need to pick up one of those four-pound bags of M&Ms the next time I’m at Costco for the larger sample size it will provide
Back in the 1970s, the main red die used for food, Red Dye #2, was found to be a carcinogen. This lead to grayish maraschino cherries and mainly brown M&Ms. Without the red dye, you couldn’t produce red or orange. There were also no blue M&Ms at that time because blue dye was rather expensive. I don’t know why green were few and far in between. Maybe too many greens without reds and orange would make a funny looking mixture.
Here’s a chart from Wikipedia showing the various colors in M&Ms throughout the years.
Which is strange because I was told that the original M&Ms given to the army grunts were all brown in color.
M&Ms never used Red Dye #2, but they temporarily dropped the red candies anyway because of all the bad publicity. They replaced red with orange. Then when red was reintroduced a couple of years later, they kept the orange as well. Blue was was introduced later, replacing tan.
