Guilt Free Chocolate: Introducing Freshmen To Chemical Engineering

Food processing is an excellent topic to introduce early in the engineering curriculum, as students are familiar with many food products but often do not realize that chemical engineers are responsible for many of the processing and packaging steps in this industry. We have developed a hands-on experiment to introduce freshman engineering or high school students to chemical engineering principles and measurements through chocolate coating of cookies. Student groups will melt chocolate and coat commercially-available cookies, then perform several measurements and calculations. This paper details the experimental set-up and analysis of the module and discusses more advanced experiments that can be incorporated throughout the curriculum.