Who likes chocolate? Apparently a lot of people, since the annual consumption worldwide was 72 million tons in the latest statistics available. According to Statistica, U.S. chocolate consumption as of July 2015 was 9.5 pounds per year per person. That may sound a lot, but the highest consumption was in Switzerland, where the per person average was 19.8 pounds. Mars, Inc. is a prodigious producer of retail chocolate, to the tune of $18.4 billion in 2015.
Our focus in this article is not the U.S. or Switzerland, but Australia, which tops America with a per person annual chocolate consumption of 10.8 pounds. But enough about numbers.
In order to help Australians get their chocolate on, in more ways than one, Mars Australia has launched a web app called HUNGERithm. In a nutshell, or rather in a cacao bean, what HUNGERithm does is track the emotional level of the Internet, presumably by tracking Twitter tweets and other posts. As the Internet gets angrier, the price of Snickers chocolate bars goes down, presumably to encourage people to moderate their mood with some soothing chocolate. You can access the website on a smartphone or tablet, which makes it a sort of mobile Health Tech application. When you need your chocolate fix (or just can’t resist the price when it bottoms out), you can request a barcode that you take to your nearest 7-Eleven convenience store and get the discounted price.
Clearly your mileage may vary with the HUNGERithm, and we’re not even going to talk about sugar and fat and other dietary downer stuff like that. Chocolate does have antioxidants and can help release endorphins in most people, so let’s just accentuate the positive and help make the Internet a happier place to hang out.
