Double Stuf Oreos

A reader recently submitted some delicious allegations to TINA.org: Citing a 2013 Business Insider article, they claimed that Double Stuf Oreos may contain as little as just “1.86 times more ‘stuf’ (crème)” than the original variety.

Since A) it’s been some years since those allegations emerged and B) we wanted an excuse to label “cookies” a business expense, TINA.org has investigated the matter in what was truly a lesson in delayed gratification.

Hope you brought your slide rule, because it’s time for some math.

Quick Background

The original 1.86 number came from a high school math class experiment, which Business Insider then replicated.

BI found that, on average, Double Stufs contained just 1.91 times as much crème, despite Nabisco’s protest that “[its] recipe for the Oreo Double Stuf Cookie has double the Stuf, or crème filling, when compared with our base, or original Oreo cookie.”

But Nabisco’s “double” claim could be based on a variety of measurements: height, mass, volume or even density. Just to be safe, TINA.org measured and calculated all four of these metrics but to be fair, it should be noted that our equipment was not state-of-the-art. Drum roll please…

Findings

The Double Stuf Oreos we tested were, in fact, double-stuffed – at least by one metric.

When a very hungry TINA.org staffer measured the crème fillings of a pack of each variety of cookies, here’s what they found on average:

As near as we could determine (i.e., using a kitchen scale that only measures to the gram) the crème in Double Stuf Oreos had, on average, twice the mass as regular Oreos. It did not, however, stand twice as tall, nor did it have twice the volume or density.

In other words, even though this was a very enjoyable experiment for TINA.org, which it encourages any math student or math enthusiast to replicate, the allegations against this cookie are no slam dunks.