ISU students’ honesty was tested when a company set up an experiment to see just how honest they are.

Honest Tea, founded in 1998, is a company based on honesty between customers and the company itself, according to it’s website. Honest Tea uses all natural ingredients to create its organic teas in order to make them less sweet, but more flavorful.

The company is in its third year of an experiment developed to test the honesty of their customers.

Katelyn Jones, representatives from Honest Tea who watched over the stand at Iowa State, said the company wants to see if their customers are as honest as Honest Tea.

Jones explained that Honest Tea sets up an unmanned tea stand and advertises its teas for $1 a bottle. Customers can either put $1 in a box, or they can simply take the tea and go about their business.

An Honest Tea representative watches the stand to see who pays and who doesn’t, and at the end of the day they calculate the number of teas gone and the amount of money collected to determine how honest the customers were, Jones said.

In 2013, the company took the experiment nationwide. From July 8 to 18, they conducted the experiment at 61 locations all across the United States. All the money collected from the experiment will be donated to FoodCorps, which “connects kids to real food and helps them grow up healthy,” according to its website.

The company since has taken the experiment to college campuses all over the nation as well, such as Iowa State, known as the “HONEST Campus” tour.

On Oct. 15, Honest Tea set up a stand near the Union Drive Community Center. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., representatives from Honest Tea sat inside UDCC and observed. At the end of the experiment, they counted the money and amount of teas taken and reported the results to Iowa State.

Out of the 78 bottles of tea gone after the experiment, 76 had been paid for. This means that 97.4 percent of the students who took a bottle also paid for it, said Brittney Rutherford, program coordinator of ISU Dining.

In comparison, during the experiment in cities all over the United States, Honest Tea found that 98 percent of customers in Iowa were honest.

The results from the national study in cities all over the United States found that 92 percent of their customers were honest. All 50 states and Washington, D.C., were tested, and 47 of the 50 states had a large enough sample size to determine a value.

Iowa State’s value ranks ninth out of 48 sites, with the highest values coming from Alabama and Hawaii, who had values of 100 percent.

Texas, West Virginia and Washington D.C. were the least honest places in the United States, with values of 87 percent, 85 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Rutherford said that Honest Tea came to Iowa State through the beverage contract the university has with Coca-Cola.

“[Coca-Cola] presents us with different things that they can bring to campus from time to time,” Rutherford said. “It just kind of comes up sporadically, and this Honest Tea thing happened to be in our area, and they wondered if we wanted to let them come to campus, so we did.”

All the money collected from the experiment will be donated to a charity of Iowa State’s choosing. Rutherford said that the university hopes to decide on a charity by the end of this semester.

Jones said she didn’t expect Iowa State to be dishonest.

“Our students do phenomenal work on campus as part of clubs, as part of volunteer organizations, our students are always doing something great, and so I had no reservations about bringing Honest Tea to campus and setting up their honest store,” Rutherford said.

Rutherford said she is excited the results from the experiment are high.