4 MIT Students Earn A’s for M&M; Coating Process

Not all engineering students design brighter laser beams or more efficient computer chips. Four MIT undergraduates are looking for ways to build a better M&M.;

The semester-long quest by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students began with a shipment of 1,500 pounds of “naked” M&Ms.; Their mission: to find a quicker and cheaper way to make the 50-year-old confection melt in your mouth and not in your hand.

M&M-Mars; Co. of Hackettstown, N.J., donated the chocolate pieces, green dye and a scaled-down version of a mixer used to make the candy coating for the class project.

For months, the MIT Chemical Engineering Laboratory was covered with the chocolate centers, which were lightly dusted with powdered sugar to keep them from sticking together.

The students devised what they thought would be a faster, more economical way to coat the candy, then experimented with their samples.

The results weren’t all academic.

One student, senior Joseph J. Berghammer of Elm Grove, Wis., said all the would-be engineers reached the same conclusion--the M&Ms; “taste real good.”

“All of us gained weight during this thing,” said Prof. Jeffrey L. Feerer, who oversaw the students’ work.

The goal of the class, Feerer said recently, was to teach students how to apply theory to the practical problems of industry. The four students earned A’s for their work, Feerer said.

Besides giving the four undergraduates a focus for their studies, the project also benefited other students at MIT. At the end of the semester, the M&Ms; from the project were given away.

“After we coated the M&Ms;, we had all these green M&Ms; all over the lab, so we essentially told all the people at MIT to come in and get ‘em,” Feerer said, adding that some were also donated to charities in Cambridge.

“I would come in the morning, and there would be five or six students waiting outside the door to get some. This lasted about three days. There were green M&Ms; all over campus.”