How (not) to do a blind taste test

It all started with my first visit to Eataly at Valley Fair, when I wandered the groceries section in search of truffle chips. Well, I found the Urbani chips my friend posted about on her IG story, but got some sticker shock at the self-checkout: $13.90. It had never even crossed my mind that chips could cost more than $10 a bag, but I figured I needed to try and see what the big deal was.

Another friend saw my IG story about these $14 chips, and tipped me off to Trader Joe’s truffle chips, which were much more reasonably priced at $2.99 (albeit in a smaller bag). It was then that I decided to do a blind taste test with these chips — you know, to see what $10 tastes like.

I’ve only conducted one other blind taste test before, when I visited Paris and discovered that even McDonald’s served macarons. So I bought macarons from several different places to see if my friends would be able to distinguish the much cheaper but still decent McDonald’s macarons from the more expensive places (they could).

For the truffle chip test, I added two other contenders to the mix: Kettle’s Truffle and Salt chips (I saw them at the supermarket), and some random Asian truffle chips (my friend Karen saw them at the Asian market). With that, the stage was set: 4 different chips at 4 different price points. Surprisingly, the Eataly Urbani chips weren’t the most expensive chips in the lineup; the Asian truffle chips cost more than 3x as much (!!!) on a per ounce basis.

For reference, here are the chips as presented on the ballot:

• A: Trader Joe’s $2.99 / 6 oz ($0.50/oz)
• B: Kettle $3.99 / 8.5 oz ($0.47/oz)
• C: Asian summer fragrance $7.59 / 2 oz ($3.80/oz)
• D: Urbani $13.90 / 12 oz ($1.16/oz)

Unfortunately, I messed up the blind part of the taste test (more on that below), but here’s what you need to properly conduct one:

1. Labeled place cards and plates.
2. Ballots. You do need to put some thought into this: I went through a couple iterations with mine, and still didn’t get it right. Instead of having people identify which chip was what brand (along with descriptors), I should have just had people identify the chips based on pricing alone. There should be as little information on the ballot as possible so as to not give away anything.
3. Palette cleanser. I didn’t even think about this until Nathan mentioned it right before the tasting. Luckily I had some pita chips that I pulled out if people wanted it. Maybe there were better choices, but I’ll have to do some research for next time.
4. Ground rules. Really, just one rule is needed: no talking, so as to not influence what other people are thinking. This is also how I screwed up — a participant was asking about the prices of the chips when I accidentally gave away which ones were the Eataly chips.

Sadly, this means the results were tainted, but here were the findings:

• Overall it was a toss-up between the Kettle Truffle chips (B) and the Urbani Eataly chips (D). I would definitely give the edge to the Urbani chips over the Kettle chips, as the latter were a bit too salty.
• If you tasted the chips in order (A->B->C->D), you could barely taste any truffle in the Urbani chips at the end. If you started with the Urbani chips, though, they were pretty strong.
• The Asian truffle chips were pretty polarizing, and actually kind of racist; only Asian people liked them.
• I am not sure that I could realistically tell which ones were the Trader Joe’s chips versus the more expensive Urbani chips. Maybe we’ll have to do another blind taste test (with no talking) to see who could actually tell the difference between the two.

Before you go out and buy truffle chips based on what I shared above, let me add one more finding — I gathered from the conversation afterwards that most of the participants actually preferred non-truffle chips: Cory said he’d rather have Doritos, and Malik liked the palette cleanser chips the most. While I might buy one more bag of the Urbani chips just for fun, ultimately the price and inconvenience just isn’t worth it to me. In the meantime, if you want in on the next blind taste test, feel free to hit me up.