Unraveling the mystery of the rounder, sweeter chocolate bar

Why are consumers saying that the new rounded Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bar tastes sweeter than the original? CHARLES SPENCE explains.

THOSE living in the UK may well have come across thecurious case of the new Cadbury’s chocolate bar (Fig. 1). Consumers have been writing and phoning-in in droves to voice their concern about what has happened to their much-loved Dairy Milk bar. In particular, many of them have been complaining that the new, rounder format bar tastes ‘too sweet’.

In reply, Tony Bilsborough of Mondelēz International, the wing of Kraft that runs Cadbury, has been quoted as saying that: “We have been very clear and consistent that we have not changed the recipe of the much-loved Cadbury Dairy Milk, although it’s certainly true that we changed the chunk last year from the old, angular shape to one that’s curved.” [1].

The mystery of the chocolate bar that has become too sweet without its formulation having changed starts to make sense once one delves into the recent literature on shape symbolism and crossmodal correspondences, as they apply to the world of taste and flavour ([2,3] for reviews). Surprising though it may seem, people make consistent matches between shape properties (such as angularity and roundness as captured by the shapes anchoring the line scale shown in Figure 2) and various tastes, flavour, aromas, and oral-somatosensory textures in food and drink [4,5]. As far as chocolate goes, Ngo and colleagues [6] have demonstrated that people match the sweeter taste of milk chocolate with rounder shapes while pairing the bitter taste of dark chocolate with shapes that are more angular instead (Figure 2). The generalisation that has now been documented across a range of food and beverage products is that sweetness is associated with roundness while bitterness is associated with angularity.

The shape symbolism of chocolate

The figure shows the shape symbolism scale that has often been used by researchers working in this area. People are given a food or beverage product to taste or smell and are requested to place a mark somewhere along the scale that, in some sense, ‘matches’ the taste, flavour, aroma, or texture of what they are experiencing (tasting and smelling). Note here that we are not talking about the shape that the food normally has, but rather the more abstract shape that feels like it goes with the sensory qualities of the foodstuff being evaluated. Note also that the position of the angular and rounded labels on the scale are normally reversed on half of the trials to rule out any form of spatial bias in these tasks. Superimposed over the scale are the schematic results of a study by Ngo and colleagues [6] demonstrating that people match sweeter milk chocolate (with a lower cocoa content) with a more rounded shape, while matching the more bitter dark chocolate with a more angular shape instead. The small arrow indicates midpoint of scale.

To date, sweetness has been paired with roundness in a range of different foodstuffs ranging from fruit juices to yoghurts and from milk chocolate to fruit juices. By contrast, angularity has been matched with bitterness, carbonation, and sourness in beers, sparkling waters, fruits, fruit juices, dark chocolates, salt and vinegar crisps, and so on (see [3-6] for reviews). When it comes to the question of where these shape symbolic associations come from in the first place, one plausible suggestion that has been made is that angularity, bitterness, and carbonation might be associateAir Huarache Run Ultra BR