It seems like all packaged foods do this now
It seems like all packaged foods do this now
I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.
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5/16 oz out of 5 oz is just over 6%.
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Thank you! I don't get why they use such weird measurements. Why not use %?
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Probably because, as evidenced by most others' attempts to do simple arithmetic in this thread, percentages are even more difficult to calculate.
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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...
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You can't divide 5/16 by 5?
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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.
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exactly
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5/80
Easy 😎
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6.25%
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Congratulations
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1/16th
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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.
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A lot of American stuff has English French and Spanish so it can cover the whole continent basically
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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.
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Do Americans set their scales to metric?
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I do as well - just because I live in a backwards country doesn’t mean I have to be backwards too
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I do.
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USDA contractor here, we use metric on the scales we use day to day.
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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
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.5 is not 25% of 4
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Why is the basic arithmetic in this thread so terrible?
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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
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It's not necessarily a conspiracy. They're all just doing it because it's easy and there's plausible deniability.
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TBH, I was hungover a piss, and was like fuck it.
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280 comments