MIT Students Get Taste of the Sweet Life : Engineering: Four undergraduates earned top grades on their final assignment by finding faster, cheaper ways to coat M&M; candies.

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.

One student, senior Joseph J. Berghammer of Elm Grove, Wis., said the would-be engineers reached the same conclusion in their M&M-coating; study.

“They taste real good,” he said.

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.

“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.

“Finally, the things we’ve studied in textbooks for three years can actually apply to the real world,” Berghammer said. His group also included junior Neelan Choksi of Corpus Christi, Tex.; junior Jeffrey Falkowski of New York City, and senior Ashley K. Shih of Wichita Falls, Tex.

Feerer said he could not discuss what exactly goes into the coating process, nor what the students discovered.

“I don’t think M&M;’s would like us giving away their secrets,” Feerer said.

M&M-Mars;, which makes 200 million M&Ms; per day, often supports research projects at universities across the country, said company spokesman Hans Fiuczynski.

In addition, he said, the company is always trying to get the best and the brightest students to consider working in the food industry.

“They all see themselves in computers. But the food industry has tremendous engineering prospects,” he said.

Besides giving the four undergraduates a focus for their academic 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&M;’s, we had all these green M&M;’s 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 for about three days,” Feerer said. “There were green M&Ms; all over campus.”