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I have in front of me a four pound container of Jelly Bellies, purchased—naturally—at
Costco. Now, that brand of sweetmeat is widely (I daresay perhaps even universally)
agreed to be delicious. Unfortunately, however, this particular mix contains no fewer
than 49 discrete flavors, and a few of
these are absolutely wretched. The cinnamon
and licorice beans might be fine on their own, but they easily overpower any other
flavors they happen to be eaten with. And nothing can take the pleasure out of a
handful of beans quite like the nauseating taste of the loathsome "Buttered Popcorn"
bean.
In an attempt to alleviate this problem that has long vexed even the most gung-ho
candy aficionados, I propose a device that can be programmed to sort jelly beans
according to one's preferences. It consists of a hopper to hold the beans, which then feed
one at a time into an analysis chamber, where each bean is optically measured to
determine its flavor. Once that is determined, the bean is either pushed down the
"accept" or "reject" chutes accordingly. Programming the device consists of putting it
into either accept or reject mode, then loading a sample of each type of bean into the
hopper as appropriate. Multiple programs can be stored in case you want to sub-sort
the beans further, or in case different people want to use the device.
After sorting out the beans, you can place the good ones back into the container, and
simply toss the awful ones out. Or give them to your spouse, who, stupefying though it
may be, actually purports to enjoy the taste of "Melted Tire" or "Rancid Roadkill"
(either of which would be a vastly more accurate description than "Toasted
Marshmallow").
Quality Street Centrifuge
Quality_20Street_20Centrifuge
Maybe you could reuse some of the R&D that went into this design. [Wrongfellow, May 06 2011]
Recipes for taste combination satisfaction
http://www.jellybel...y_bean_recipes.aspx
[RayfordSteele, May 06 2011]
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Annotation:
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Seems like there's a candy store in the mall that sells by the pound every flavor separated. Just mix and match. |
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A clever fellow could perform some taste tests, and program the machine to dispense the right number and combination to produce a meta flavor, a handful that combined taste like a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, or a strawberry margarita. |
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A clever fellow did. See Jelly Belly's link... |
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No turkey sandwich but that's pretty awesome, thanks. |
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/ optically measured to determine its flavor / seemingly makes no sense. Do you mean determine its color? (Then one would have to trust the color <-> flavor reference standards (are these things published?). Or do you mean a high-powered laser would ablate a small portion of the bean into the air which would be sucked into a gas chromatography instrument for composition analysis? |
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Could a scanning electron microscope image the molecules of the surface, and use optical recognition to identify aromatic compounds? |
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This relates in no very certain way to the worrying issue of
flavour distributions in tubes of Rowntree's fruit gums, and the
fact that there always seem to be more red ones than any other
flavour. |
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What a good idea. Post it (if you can write round the 'flavours'
prohibition). |
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//Do you mean determine its color? (Then one would have
to trust the color <-> flavor reference standards (are
these things published?).// |
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Correct. The flavor correlates directly with the color and
pattern of the bean. |
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This container—as I believe is the
case with most Jelly Belly packages—does indeed have a
list the flavors contained therein, along with a picture of
each type of bean. But since the device could record the
optical pattern of each bean in the programming phase,
it would be unnecessary to rely on any such tables. |
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//Seems like there's a candy store in the mall that sells by
the pound every flavor separated. Just mix and match.// |
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Indeed, but it's considerably more expensive to do so, and
these stores often don't have as many flavors available
individually as can be found in an assortment. |
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Might as well get someone to swing that four pound bucket of sugar directly into one of your kidneys. |
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The assortment at Costco runs about $19 for four pounds, whereas
you'd be hard pressed to find individual flavors of Jelly Bellies at a
price less than $8/lb (at least according to a cursory Google search,
which agrees with my general recollection). You could discard
nearly half the beans from the assortment, and still come out ahead
this way. If wastefulness is the concern, and you don't happen to have a spouse lacking taste buds,
then perhaps you could use them for some sort of art project or something. |
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Granted, you'd have to eat an awful lot of Jelly Bellies to recoup the
cost of the sorting machine, but that's a problem for marketing, not
R&D. |
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A Coulter counter for jelly beans [+]. The beans would be in
free-fall from the time they left the hopper till the time a
puff of gas nudged them into a collection chute. Most of
this could be visible inside a transparent enclosure. Would
be mesmerizing to watch. Or, for those less easily
mesmerized, it could be the basis for a gambling game. |
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I do not know what a 'Jelly Belly' is. I don't know why one may require more than a pound of them.
I DO know what a "sweetmeat" is and do NOT want to indulge- not even an ounce. Thank you.
Google is your friend.
Where is Jinbish when you kneed him? |
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My roadies already do this for me. |
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Do they also peel grapes? |
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Just so long as its sweetmeats and not sweetbreads. |
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A jellybean that tastes like calf pancreas is probably
not going to be much of a hit. Nor those flavoured
to resemble parotid glands, sublingual glands and
testicles of cattle, sheep and pigs. |
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