Chocolate milk is, by all accounts, delicious.

It’s also an incredibly simple concoction: just milk, made chocolatey. As the name would suggest.

And yet, it turns out many people do not understand how chocolate milk is made: some genuinely believe chocolate milk is milk from brown cows.

Whether those brown cows are also thought to produce cocoa and sugar is not clear.

In a study by the Innovation Centre of US Dairy, it was found that seven per cent of Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That works out at about 16.4m people.

These weren’t children either – the research was conducted on 1,000 people over the age of 18.

A whopping 48 per cent of people said they didn’t know where chocolate milk came from.

So beloved is chocolate milk that 29 per cent of people use their children as an excuse to buy the drink for themselves.

This isn’t the first study to reach a worrying conclusion though – previous research has found that nearly one in five Americans do not know that hamburgers are made from beef.

Hershey's advert from 1980s questions where chocolate milk comes from

“At the end of the day, it’s an exposure issue,” said Cecily Upton, co-founder of the nonprofit FoodCorps, which brings agricultural and nutrition education into elementary schools.

“Right now, we’re conditioned to think that if you need food, you go to the store. Nothing in our educational framework teaches kids where food comes from before that point.”

And apparently some people don’t feel any huge need to find out either.

“We still get kids who are surprised that a French fry comes from a potato, or that a pickle is a cucumber,” Upton said.