About the Chocolate Milk Index

Every review ends with one overall rating from 1 to 10. A milk’s CMI score is the average of those ratings, recalculated whenever somebody reviews it. There is no editorial adjustment and no secret weighting: a milk with one review shows that person’s number, plainly, and a milk nobody has rated shows none at all rather than a figure it has not earned.

A review also rates 3 quality axes — flavor, mouthfeel and aftertaste — which are averaged into a separate quality score shown on the milk’s page.

A milk needs at least 3 reviews before it appears in the site’s highest-rated list. One enthusiastic rating is worth reading; it is not yet a ranking.

Most rating systems collapse everything into one number, which forces a reader to guess whether a 6 means the milk was badly made or simply not to that person’s taste. Here those are different questions.

Taste descriptors — chocolate intensity, cocoa character, sweetness, thickness and creaminess — are recorded on every review and never touch any score. “Very sweet” is a fact about a milk, not a fault in it, and somebody who wants a sweet milk should be able to find one without wading through somebody else’s disapproval. Price is kept out of the score for the same reason.

Because descriptors are kept clean, they can be used for something better than ranking. Rate enough milks and the site builds a palate profile from 5 axes — faint to intense, milky to dark, plain to sweet, watery to thick and lean to rich — and sorts people into four families by the kind of chocolate milk they actually like. It is a description of your taste, not a score of it. The four palates are explained here.

Reviews say whether a milk is good. They do not say whether you can buy it. So a review can be paired with a sighting: the shop and the town where somebody found it, pinned on the milk’s own map.

Sightings come in two kinds. Sipped means somebody bought one there and drank it; spotted means they only saw it on the shelf. Both land on the map, and only sips count toward the places on a contributor’s profile. Pins mark the town, never an address, and other people can confirm or refute one so a milk that has been discontinued stops being advertised as available.

Aaron, as a hobby. The catalogue, the scoring and the site itself are one person’s work; the ratings in it are not, and that is the point — the score attached to a milk is whatever everyone who has tried it says, not a verdict handed down by whoever built the page.

Corrections are welcome and acted on. A wrong figure or a misspelled brand stays wrong until somebody says so, so if you find one, send it through here.

Anybody can read the site. Rating, adding a milk, uploading a photo and reporting a sighting need an account, which needs an email address and nothing else. New milks and photos are checked by a moderator before they appear in the catalogue, so a milk you add is visible to you straight away and to everybody else once it is approved.

Photos are resized in your browser before they are uploaded, and the location and camera data phones write into a photo are stripped before it is stored.

Browse the catalogue, see what is rated highest, or make an account and rate the last chocolate milk you drank.