Oreos and Math.

The other day I popped into the store and the cookie aisle caught my attention.  I remember eating them as a child when I visited friends houses.  We always had cookies made from scratch at our house so having a store bought one was a huge treat.

So I went and looked up information on the cookies and found some really cool information, some of which is actually mathematical.

For instance, when students ask about ratios in real life, you can tell them that all oreos are made with a 71 percent cookie to 29 percent filling ratio.  In addition the double stuff does not have double the stuffing.  A math class in New York checked it out and discovered the filling is only 1.86 times more. The mega stuff oreo advertised they had triple the filling but in reality it was only 2.68 times.

Now back to the cookie filling ratio.  The company makes 123,000 tons of creme every year to fill those cookies.  Let the students figure how how many tons of cookies are made.

More than 500 billion cookies have been sold since 1912.   To get an idea of that number, if you lined the cookies up end to end, the line would go around the earth at least 312 times.  The circumference of the earth is just over 24,900 miles.  Let the students figure out how many miles that is.

In addition, if you stack that same number of cookies one on top of the other, the stack can go from the earth to the moon and back 8 times.  The distance is 238,900 miles between the earth to the moon.  Let them figure out the distance 8 times represents. 

The creation of one oreo from start to finish takes 59 minutes.  Every cookie bakes for exactly 290.6 seconds.  Let students figure out what percent of the 59 minutes that is.

Another interesting fact is that in 2011 - 35 billion cookies sold in one year, 10 billion were sold in the United States alone.   The rest were sold to the other 99 counties who sell it.  So on average, how many were sold in these countries.

Lots of nice real world math provide by the history and current facts for Oreo cookies.

Let me know what you think.