- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.
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I have the same scale. I wouldn’t trust it too far, especially combined with the tolerances and humidity weight changes.
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Let me introduce you to tolerance in measuring instruments and measuring errors.
Edit: Apparently I’m pro evil companies because I just pointed out that scales (and more importantly non-professional scales) have relatively high error tolerances (+ the measurament method error). Thus the measuring of this pasta and the possible interpretations of it have to take into account that.
That does not apply in today’s world where shrinkflation and consumer fraud run rampant.
It us solely the company’s responsibility to ensure each package is labeled with the correct weight, not the consumer to tolerate excuses like “measuing errors” whether they’re valid or not. Companies have too much power to just not know or be able to accurately weigh or label their product, ergo if there’s a problem, they chose to have it in there. And if you dispute that, I will simply block you and move on.
Stop defending evil corporations. Stop doing this.
It us solely the company’s responsibility to ensure each package is labeled with the correct weight, not the consumer to tolerate excuses like “measuing errors” whether they’re valid or not
The measuring error is on OP’s end, not the manufacturer.
You think tolerances and measuring errors don’t exist just because shrinkflation and fraud are things that exist?
I hate capitalism and corporate bullshit, too, but I don’t need to get outraged at the shit that’s barely an inconvenience like missing 8 grams of spaghetti in a 410 gram package that was mass produced. That shit would happen even if the companies weren’t asshats.
missing 8 grams of spaghetti in a 410 gram package
It’s more likely that the scales are inaccurate.
Yes, they are literally just excuses for shrinkflation and companies only benefit from shitheads like you to give them an easy out.
The world doesn’t revolve around tiny minute details and jargon from a field that doesn’t actually positively affect most people’s lives.
Our kitchen scales are the standard, not your overblown overpriced ones that are too precise to be meaningful to the average consumer.
We are in charge, not you.
That’s an absurd take, how can a company know anything about whatever random crappy scale you bought second hand?
We have standards for a reason.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t actually understand how technology works”.
surprised this wasn’t a lemmygrad user
All that speech does not change that the weighing scales he is using is cheap af and thus the measuring error is high enough. Even if the guys at the company had the best measuring system in the world without error and they packed 410g of pasta, the guy measuring at home with that scale would probably mesure a vaule not equal to the nominal one.
Maybe the scales have measuring errors because they defend evil corporations. “Please scales stop defending evil corporations!!”. Dude i hate scales they are so much pro system…
Srry your comment was too funny for me.
All that speech doesn’t change the fact that your standards don’t matter, ours do, and if our scales don’t match what that package says, you have to put more product in to make it do so or you are defrauding us. Period.
Now come back when you’re ready to meet our standards.
your standards don’t matter, ours do, and if our scales don’t match what that package says, you have to put more product in to make it do so or you are defrauding us. Period.
I’m not sure if I’m missing a joke here, but are you asking for some alternative-metrology here?!
Weight is a well-defined standard, and a properly calibrated scale > your kitchen scale.
Yeah this guy is pure comedy at this point tbh. Are you of the “our standards” team or “their standards” team (very evil, probably eat childs too)
You sound like an angry oldman not wanting to accept reality.
So you want companies to put excess product because you don’t know how to measure correctly (or don’t have good equipment). Well ask them. For the price of 410g, too? No? And maybe a paycheck supplement too.
I want a lot of things too.
The point is that it isn’t false advertising if you don’t know how to measure well. Is not a standar or whatever you think it is. It’s reality.
Outside the kindergarten where everything seems so simple and easy to understand. In real life you don’t have ideal things. You don’t have an ideal measuring place.
Sources of error when measuring:
- The material cut tolerance.
- Your house not being perfectly smooth leveled.
- (for electronic scales) RF noise.
- (for electronic scales) Tolerance on electronic components.
- The scale subjection points not perfectly pressed.
- (for electronic scales) discretization error.
- Components degradation.
- Humidity.
- Gas denisty near the scale.
- Gravity fluctuations in the region of measurement.
- Surface of the sample not resting completly in the scale plate. Etc.
And you are ranting about evil and “our” standards or whatever for a 2% error in the measurement? I would expect a 5% error given all that. That scale must be an exceptional good one.
It’s not standards it’s reality. Why do you think measuring labs are so expensive? Evil companies?
Try measuring your height more than once and see if results change. Hey if they change, you work for the evil companies, and you probably live in our “standards zone”.
Our/Yours standards was pure comedy. It’s getting better and better.
You aren’t shit. They scales do meet standards that are tested periodically to ensure they aren’t false advertising. Do you really think these corporations don’t have audits?
Calm down, touch grass, try to get in touch with reality and stay off the tankie portions of the internet that feed these delusions.
It’s clearly a conspiracy by Big Scale to sell more scales.
Somehow its always lower than claimed.
“Always” is a really strong word that you should not be using in this context since it’s just not true.
For example, there once was more than indicated on a package of lentils in 1958. So it’s clearly not always.
Got em!
Last year this claim went around for the Loblaws No Name brand in Canada so I went shopping with my kitchen scale, preparing to be outraged. Everything was a solid 10% over the advertised weight.
the tolerance exploit
When was the last time OP performed a guage R&R with a traceable calibrated mass standard? 😂
The FDA regulation on Net Weight is found in 21 CFR 101.105. In this regulation FDA makes allowance for reasonable variations caused by loss or gain of moisture during the course of good distribution practice or by unavoidable deviations in good manufacturing practice. FDA states that variations from the stated quantity of contents should not be unreasonably large.
While FDA does not provide a specific allowable tolerance for Net Weight, this matter could come under FTC jurisdiction. FTC has proposed regulations that would unify USDA and FDA Net Contents labeling and incorporate information found in the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) Handbook 133.
NIST Handbook 133 specifies that the average net quantity of contents in a lot must at least equal the net quantity declared on the label. Plus or minus deviation is permitted when caused by unavoidable variation in weighing and measuring that occur in good manufacturing practice. The maximum allowable variance for a package with a net weight declaration of 5 oz is 5/16 oz. Packages under-filled by more than this amount are considered non-compliant.
5/16 oz
How many football fields to the gallon is that? On a serious note this is something far better expressed as a fraction than an amount of difference for one specific container size…
You can’t divide 5/16 by 5?
It’s not really clear whether the variance scales linearly with weight. We only know 1 data point. It could be bracketed for different weight groups.
exactly
6.25%
Congratulations
5/80
Easy 😎
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1/16th
The maximum allowable variance for a package with a net weight declaration of 5 oz is 5/16 oz.
oddly, that’s just over 8g, the difference noted in OP’s example. so, OP’s package is within he allowable tolerance, just.
And it would probably be more expensive to get precision-calibrated equipment to get you at the bottom end of the tolerance to save product cost than what it would cost to just aim for the correct value with less precise equipment.
This one is a conspiracy theory I struggle to get behind. It seems like the conspiracy would be less profitable than the “proper” behavior here.
You know full well that they did some statistical analysis and determined the minimum possible amount of pasta that they could try to put in that box, taking into account variations in their machinery and moisture content.
Big “How much can a banana cost, $10?” energy here.
We’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here. Think about how much effort you are implying the company put into this versus what 8g of major wholesale flour costs – the only cost they’d really be saving in this conspiracy.
Even at consumer retail prices that’s, what, $0.012 per box? And I bet wholesale prices are at least an order of magnitude less than that. Is the maybe tenth of a percent of cost savings worth a potential class action lawsuit and the horrific pain of Discovery that comes with it? And does that maybe tenth a percent of cost savings even come close to covering all the additional production costs involved in having that machinery calibrated so much more precisely? The juice is not worth the squeeze, my friend.
You think you’re arguing that they would do evil for profit’s sake, but you’re actually arguing they would do evil for evil’s sake even at the expense of profit.
Just so that I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying a company that sells tens of billions of dollars of pasta per year is not interested in saving a penny ot a fraction of a penny per box?
Do you think anyone is going to win a class action lawsuit against a pasta company that 1-5% of the time puts just barely too little pasta in the box. You think we’re going to have that kind of righteous justice? Haha. Do you think people would even be that surprised given that, as you say, “we’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here.” No, if this was found to be true, whatever regulatory agency would just give them a warning.
It’s not about being evil, is about the way capitalism works. If they’re putting more product in the box than they have to, they’re fools.
And you don’t “precisely calibrate the machinery.” You just figure out what the variations are and you set it to the minimum. If you’re supposed to have something like 9-11 oz of pasta in your box and you know that your machine will give you whatever you set it to, +/- 0.2 oz of pasta, 99% of the time, you set your machine to 9.2 or 9.3 oz. You don’t set it to 10 oz.
4.7 billion is Barillas global revenue, that’s a lot for one person but for a multi-continent good distributor it’s not.
I know you’re angry at the worlds injustices and all but I don’t think the bargain brand dry pasta company is the source of a part of your global conspiracy
I’m not angry and I don’t think this is a global conspiracy. I just believe that large companies are motivated to cut costs wherever they can.
Have you heard of pink slime? Its a product of the beef industry. They heat and centrifuge “waste trimmings” to get a little bit of additional gooey fatty animal product and then add it to ground beef. It’s pretty gross and it adds only a miniscule amount to the profit margin.
Large companies do everything they can to make as much money as possible.
Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.
5/16 oz out of 5 oz is just over 6%.
Thank you! I don’t get why they use such weird measurements. Why not use %?
Probably because, as evidenced by most others’ attempts to do simple arithmetic in this thread, percentages are even more difficult to calculate.
In the nineties, 4oz ground pepper cans made on a line I worked on.
The tolerances were horrible.
McCormick was 3.9 I think
Black and white can 3.5. !!! (25%)
Yes both were made on the same exact line
.5 is not 25% of 4
Why is the basic arithmetic in this thread so terrible?
Because it’s full of delusional angry people that think there’s a global conspiracy to short consumers tiny percentages of our food to keep us subjugated and poor
It’s not necessarily a conspiracy. They’re all just doing it because it’s easy and there’s plausible deniability.
TBH, I was hungover a piss, and was like fuck it.
The FDA is probably not operating in what I can only assume is Canada from the Eng/Fra and grams usage.
But I’m sure they have something to allow for fluctuations in weight, would rather it be mandated as a minimum allowing for a bit of extra weight to over compensate however.
A lot of American stuff has English French and Spanish so it can cover the whole continent basically
Do Americans set their scales to metric?
I do as well - just because I live in a backwards country doesn’t mean I have to be backwards too
I do.
USDA contractor here, we use metric on the scales we use day to day.
Yeah, but here in Canada you don’t get Spanish very often, and it would be where the English and French would be. Also the Americans would put both units on the package.
It’s a 2% difference. The cutting and packaging is done (most probably) by machines. I have clinically diagnosed OCD, and I wouldn’t care about 8g of missing pasta… How much do you leave on the plate/in the pot/throw away? :)
Otoh, hitting exactly 410g (assuming the scale is calibrated, and you have the same temperature, air moisture and altitude as the factory), is very difficult. They could adjust their machines so the variation hangs a bit more towards the customer, but for them, 2% x millions of boxes = profit.
Most of our packaging machines require < 1%, target <0.5% variance (both ways). Honestly in practice, over a whole batch the total variance is extremely tiny.
Add to this story the accuracy of a household, not-calibrated scale? Yeah I’d say this seems OK.
What do you make?
Tolerances for food items depend a lot on item size, shape, and irregularity.
I mean… that’s a good point. I only make bulk materials, like 1 ton supersaks, and we tend to OVERfill so customers don’t complain, with the target still being close to zero for a whole batch.
This really isn’t a big deal, the customer paid 2% less off this specific box. Oh.
This isn’t a big deal, the customer paid 2% less than the calculated total for their entire order at checkout and only had to say “me shorting this transaction is just a statistical probability and you should view it as the cost of doing business with me.” Oh.
This isn’t a big deal, the customer gets massive subsidies from the government while the poor manufacturers have to pay stupid worker safety fees and unfair payroll during times of extreme economic ‘fortune’. Oh.
That seems around what I’d expect the measurement error to be anyway
On our packaging (Germany) we have a little “e” meaning it will be ± the weight with a deviation of 1.5-9% depending on the volume.
https://www.payback.de/ratgeber/besser-leben/kleines-e-auf-verpackungYeah pretty sure these are European rules as we have the same thing in the UK. Basically the current batch needs to remain above the average weight if it drops under the target weight packs will start getting rejected until the average increases.
Idk about batch weight.
Might be true. Sounds at least reasonable.Yeah I’ve worked IT in a food production environment and am familiar with setting up the products. When we went from catch weight (price per kg) to fixed weight products like ops we got loads of calls about packs being rejected and initially didn’t understand why until reading more into how e weighing rules work. I can’t remember the specifics as it was sometime ago but only a certain percentage can be below the target weight and above T1 and a smaller percentage can be between T1 and T2 which are the fall back weights.
https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/packaged-goods
Fortunately these rules are preprogrammed into checker weighers and weight price labellers so they setup is easy it’s just getting the weights right going into those machines with minimum giveaway (if the batch weighs more than the the pack count x target weight that is called giveaway).
Typical Big Noodle theft tactics
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Shrinkflation in supposed to be labeled.
Most likely this is an issue with the scale
see, capitalism works!
- sell 10million packages each with missing 2% of contents.
- sell those 200000 extra packages with the contens you “saved” (no, not 204000 with again missing 2%, see below why)
- do not pay taxes on extra packages you sold as you can “proof” you sold all 10million paying those taxes.
- receive 200000 * price of package as personal taxfree extra income.
- write that one guy who complained about missing 8grams of pasta a sorry letter
- complain about time loss and costs writing a single sorry letter and pay paper and stamp out of “marketing” campaigns budget
- complain about the world not trusting companies
- complain about people using badly adjusted scales
- complain about someone selling none-genuine products on market with your logo faked.
- assume that those packages with missing contents could be just those fake products.
done a full circle.
but… kitchen scales are really bad. most other scales as well. i tried to find (electronic) scales that are actually precise:
for low weights i ended up with a scale with 0.01 gram precison, but it could only measure a bit more than 100grams (and also included a 100gr calibration weight)
for higher weigths i only found a scale for post offices measuring packages. the only thing the vendor “really” promised was that multiple times measuring the same thing would be showing the same weight (nope the best “affordable” scale on the market here did not promise to measure correctly, just to measure over and over the same…)
i guess the options for accurate measuring of more than 100gr are:
- old style mechanical scales daily adjusted
- high priced industry/laboratory scales with warranties
fun fact:
after i bought that 0.01gr precicion scale, amazon showed me small plastic clip bags with green leaf signs on it as “recommended” products for month, while i used the scale to mix just small amounts of 2-component epoxy resin in projects.
Get a better scale first
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If everything you’re measuring is lower than expected, you should check the calibration of the scale. Weigh 2 or 3 things you know the weight of that are at different ranges of weights, light, heavy, medium, and see if any are off. Often a scale will be accurate at only within a certain range and get progressively less accurate as the weight increases or decreases from that range.
When did shrinkflation become acceptable for pasta? Even though it‘s been legal for a while to sell more individual package sizes, I would never accept a package of pasta that doesn‘t say 500g or more on it.
I am half tempted to buy a pasta making machine. The more and more food I make myself the angrier I get at the food production world.
A dumbass like me shouldn’t be able to make better tasting products for lower cost than food factories.
Net Weight vs Gross Weight
Aren’t the figures on the package meant to be net weight though?
I believe so too.
But maybe that’s not a legal requirement everywhere.
From the packagings I remember, wherever the package weight is significant, “Net Weight” is explicitly stated. So, when I see it not written, I don’t assume.
