Happy National Oreo Cookie Day! I am celebrating by having Oreos at my desk while I work the entire day. But last night my coworker, Jen (of Elephant and Piggie Party), and I celebrated early by hosting a delightfully sweet Oreo taste test. The idea for this had been brewing for a while in our office full of sweets-lovers. In fact, every time my department head brought in a new Oreo flavor for her staff (us) to sample, we always talked about how we should "make a program out of this one day." Then one day, one of us (me? Jen? My department head? Someone else?) noticed that March 6th was National Oreo Day and--poof!--a program was born!
We spent the next few months collecting Oreos as we saw them, trying to grab all the flavor possibilities and they shifted into and out of season.
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| Oreos anyone? I've got almost a years-worth! |
The plan was to have the kids walk around and sample each flavor, then quietly vote on what they thought each one was. It was a guessing game. In the end we wound up with 15 options for tasting:
Cinnamon Bun
Red Velvet
Pumpkin Spice
Apple Pie
Cookie Butter
Mocha
Chocolate Hazelnut
Mint
Birthday Cake
Hot & Spicy Cinnamon
Lemon
Coconut Thins
Salted Caramel Thins
Peanut Butter
Peeps
Last night, to set up, we put each of the 15 flavors out in little sample cups with signs that said "Taste #1," "Taste #2," etc. We also had a table in the middle for water bottles and voting. The set-up room looked like this:
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| Peek-a-boo! I have a 6-month pregnant belly again! I'm due in June! |
Then, as the kids entered the room, we had them each start in different spots and move around the tables to sample the 15 different Oreos. It was A LOT OF OREOS. Almost an irresponsible amount of Oreos, really. As they sampled, they wrote down what their flavor guesses were on their voting sheets. I whipped this sheet up in 10-minutes on Publisher. It can be seen below and downloaded here. (Enjoy!)
Some kids really put time and thought in, smelling the cookies and closing their eyes as they nibbled. Others just wrote things like "I have no idea" and "Really yummy" on their sheets. Kids are funny.
After about 25-minutes of sugar consumption, when we saw that many of the kids were wrapping up their flavor guessing, we had them come up to anonymously vote for their favorite. We decided it was better to have them vote before we revealed the answers so nobody could be biased (because Oreos clearly have different cool and uncool ranks?). Jen made the CUTEST ballot box. Look:
Then it was time to reveal the answers! The kids sat down and, cookie flavor-by-cookie flavor, I had them tell me their guesses for each sample. This was fun! A lot of them were really surprised by some of my "big reveals!" Cinnamon Bun, Cookie Butter, and Coconut were some of the biggest shockers.
In the background, while I was revealing all the answers, Jen was totaling up the favorites and compiling a first place, second place, and third place. Just for fun, she and I each took a guess at the winner before the program. My guess was mint, hers was chocolate hazelnut. The actual winner? MINT! Props for me! Here are the group's top 3:
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| That's #1 Mint, #2 Cinnamon Bun, and #3 Peeps! |
What worked least: Does a room full of kids consuming a lot of sugar in less than 30-minutes count for this? If so, that.
What worked best: I think having two of us who were equally responsible for the program in the room-- as in having two librarians as opposed to a librarian and a page-- helped keep what could have been chaos, in some order. Going forward, I don't think I would do any taste test programs solo ever again. This was so much better. It's a two librarian job!
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