I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.
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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.
I weighted my 500 gram broccoli recently and it was over 800 grams so I guess this goes both ways. Or then they’re compensating for the stem.
But you can eat the stem. Just peel it and cut it into pieces.
Compensating for the stem.
Ain’t nobody want the stem. The floret…now that’s the good shit. Motherfuckers go HAM for the floret.
Bruh the stem is great, cook that in a sauce for your favorite stir fry recipe and enjoy
That’s because motherfuckers are idiots.
Chew that stem bruh
Very nice pickled too! Or you can cut it into strips with a peeler and flash-pickle them for a nice little garnish.
Garnish is a sensual word.
If you gave me a day and a very big piece of paper to list all of words I found sensual on, I don’t think I’d go for “garnish”, but I suppose I could be talked round.
Dunno about you, but when someone says they’ll garnish my wages, it does not get my loins rustlin’.
Weight a Costco chicken some time. They’re often around 50% larger than the weight on the package.
Well… Cardboard is quite edible, maybe you should also put it on the balance.
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 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.
You’ve bought spaghetti Kelly, not cocaine.
It’s just looks like a spaghetti…
Put it in water, then you know if you have spaghetti or just fucked up.
It can be saved, add baking soda and you will have ready rock
This is why in the EU they need to display net weight.
No shit Sherlock, that’s what it is in the US as well. This is just OP being a dumbass and assuming a conspiracy instead of understanding his scale just sucks.
Yes, it seems that way because your kitchen scale is faulty and measuring everything a bit on the light side.
Nah, it’s probably correct. I work in food industry and it’s pretty much never EXACTLY right. It’s always a few grams over or under, and if the bosses get to choose they choose to have it be under.
Or it was measured differently. They could have stacked ten of them on a scale at once while you are stacking one at a time.
Or it was measured differently and they used the legally allowed error bars.
Or the kitchen scale was off.
Or there is some missing mass from say dust.
Or they were assholes and knew they could get away with it.
Lots going on and it would be hard to debug.
OP, are you American?
The real crime here is that you bought Barilla instead of DeCecco.
De Cecco, Garofalo, or Voiello.
If you have to get Barilla, at least get their fancier one (Al Bronzo or at least Collezione).
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.
Get a better scale first
That brings up a question, is that 410g required to be just the edible product or could it include the weight of the packaging?
There’s an allowed margin of error, too. If they happen to have gram-level precision, but have 10g leeway for a given product, this might be a good way to save scrape out a bit more margin.
That would be easy to prevent though with an additional requirement: The average weight over N products must be within X% of the specified weight. This way the producer cannot intentionally underfill.
Do you know how expensive that would be for a regulatory agency to test N samples from every food product.
That’s literally what they do. If you increase the number of samples, that obviously increases costs correspondingly. If it’s still a tiny sliver of everything produced it’s practical, though.
I was thinking that. Good solution. I’m not sure what would prevent them from lying though. The only way to know would be to unpack a whole batch of their products.
If they straight up lie, they’re liable for a big fine (or maybe worse, if they’re really shameless about it), and buying a few things to weigh isn’t that impractical. IIRC a chip company in Canada got caught a bit ago skimping, starting with someone who weighed a bag at home.
Now we’re doing statistics.
Sure, and you could even have many maximum sample variances prescribed in law for different N. Hell, you could even specify it in the form of a mathematical relation, and say that the sample mean has to limit to the nominal amount regardless of sample pattern. At that point, manufacturers would be forced to be at least as fair as regulators could measure, without assuming anything about how accurate their bag filling machines are or aren’t.
That’s more complicated, though, and I’m guessing they wrote in what seemed reasonable and good enough at the time. Just tightening up the percentage inaccuracy allowed for manufacture at scale to reflect technology might be good enough again, whenever they revisit these laws.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.7
It is required to be the contents. There is very little leeway for error. The FDA can and will shut your whole company down for labeling issues.
Nice, I did not know about this.
wouldnt weight slightly fluctuate with moisture content?
If you want to get technical, aren’t grams a measure of mass, not weight, so a kitchen scale needs to assume a value for gravity’s acceleration to tell you grams, which could be slightly off depending where you are on earth?
I thought that you were on to something and did a quick google search: the variation is apparently only 0.5%. And a variation that big is only found when comparing a measurement on the poles (heavier) vs the equator (lighter) and I think it unlikely that this pasta was made on Antarctica. So nope, it’s not the reason, they really do owe the op 2 grams of pasta.
tldr; why not both
Volume is not mass, and neither of them is weight. A gram is strictly speaking a measure of mass, and we just consider it to be a unit of weight in casual terms because the only frame of reference the vast majority of us have has reasonably constant gravity so we conflate mass and weight. That you can sort of use grams to measure volume is literally only because the density of common stuff (especially water) is close enough for most purposes. It’s kinda like measuring a distance in units of time so long as the method of travel is known. I can say “an hour’s walk” and I’m not really measuring distance there but you know roughly how far I mean
exactly, youre technically correct, but functionally irrelevant in this context
Also, could it be the weight with the box?
8 grams? I doubt very much a cardboard box only weighs 8 grams.
You’re correct
When you see “Net weight” or a symbol that looks like a big minuscule “e”, it means that the package weight doesn’t count.
I don’t see anything like that in OP’s picture.
I think its a fair question from a certain perspective.
However, the law requires that the package contents contain at least as much as stated. If humidity is an issue, it’s up to the manufacturer to factor that in. Besides, this is dry pasta my friend.
I also bought salami. It was 13 g short. It’s produced in the plant 4km from me.
There are no excuses to short the customer and it is illegal.
It is not illegal to sell a single container under the listed net weight.
The net weight must not be under the average weight of a sample of packages. There’s a whole set of rules for maximum allowable variance and for packages under a pound, it’s a little more than 7 grams.
Your scale is almost certainly not accurate enough to tell the difference a few tenths of a gram would make.
And that’s literally how we got the bakers dozen.
If your dozen of baked goods wasn’t above a threshold you would be harshly punished. So bakers would give an extra so there’s no way they would get in trouble.
ha, define dry (youll need to be precise). how long in the atmosphere is a packaged product warrantied to hold its weight? just curious
No you’re not curious lol You’re doing textbook sea lioning
Go find someone else to mildly anmoy
ha, ok. i thought we were having a conversation. byee!
Why are you getting downvoted? Why is Lemmy defending rich corporations and not consumers??
You opened dry pasta in a dry room and got less than the advertised amount. If there’s residual moisture in the factory that evaporates, that is their problem, not ours. Yes it’s a small variation, but that reasoning works both ways: they should include a few extra strands to make sure the consumer gets the right amount.
So they package it wet? If the weight went down it means the pasta was wetter at time of boxing.
not wet, but probably not nearly as dry, per se. also, fluctuations in temperature (specifically, mass of air in the packaging), as well as calibration issues on the devices- if you use two devices to measure… you’ll always get slightly off measurements.
It’s far more likely that this is just weight variation which is allowable per the Food Safety and Inspection Service
However, I would sooner blame the scale itself as it doesn’t look like a scientific scale. So it’s likely not calibrated and will drift over time. Plenty of things could explain an 8g difference as measured by the average joe.
If it weren’t obscenely expensive to do so, it would make sense for all scales to be calibrated to a NIST traceable standard, with periodic recalibrations at preset intervals.
Most kitchen scales could be easily calibrated with a measuring cup and water if they really wanted to do this. Just have a few included cups for 25,50,100ml of water and then fill them on the scale and tell it what the volume is.
That will easily get you within a gram of error for most common food weights.
If I’m reading table 2-9 right this package would be allowed to be under by 28.3g
Yeah that seems to be how it reads.
Weird that heavier packages are allowed a smaller tolerance ? Like a 198g package can be 28g under, but in the last row anything over 4.5kg needs to vary by less than 1%
RH during packing 55%, RH in OPs house 25%
Just different conditions, even his neighbors house could have a different RH and different results.
yeah, but that doesnt mean much. the hoover damn is still drying.
So is all the water it’s holding back 😱
The Hoover Dam concrete would cure in 125 years by conventional or natural methods. Crews, however, used some innovative engineering methods to hasten the process.
Nearly 600 miles of steel pipes woven through the concrete blocks significantly reduced the chemical heat from the setting for the concrete. Crews relied on 1,000-pound blocks of ice produced daily at the site’s ammonia-refrigeration plant.
Would have doesn’t mean is. Source
Fun fact, concrete actually never stops curing, so I don’t know why they claim they could speed it up. Concrete has to set, dry and cure. You can speed up the first two, but not the last. You can make it reach design spec in say 7 days instead of 28, but it never stops curing.
Opinion: If it never stops curing, then maybe we should stop using that term.
What other term would we use? Lost of items never fully “cure” I’m struggling to think of something that does. Paint doesn’t, nail polish doesn’t.
It’s why it has to dry and set first. Concrete is completely usable after it’s set, it just gets stronger as it cures.
Why do you think paint says not to wash the wall for a month after, the paint still has to cure after drying and setting.
I’m saying, come up with another term.
can I see a pic out the box with it above weight stated?
I had to explain to my kids the other day how you don’t ever wish death on anyone. I was just going to ask if OP lives somewhere dry, because that would explain why they’re seeing this with so many foods.
People might be wondering wtf there’s no moisture in dry pasta. But there is: it will absorb moisture content from the surrounding atmosphere.
I had to learn about this effect because of woodworking. Wood absorbs enough moisture to appreciably change in size over the seasons, to the point where your whole table can crack in half if it’s built the wrong way.
yeah. 8g is a tiny weight difference here and could easily be accounted-for due to humidity with pasta.
Could also just be losing a strand or two in packaging. It happens. That’s why they’re allowed some wiggle room on the packaging weight, and 8 grams is a pretty reasonable margin of error for a product like this.
The same package in Germany is 500g, so maybe there is an element of shrinkflation as well.
It’s also why the target is 410 was of 400 I’d imagine .
Idk about that. When I worked in a factory we always measured 510 g into our 500 g packages in order to avoid this happening. You’re getting ripped off and making excuses for it.
It’s called shrinkflation and it should be considered price gouging and be federally investigated.
Shrinkflation in supposed to be labeled.
Most likely this is an issue with the scale
Could be worth checking your scale, if everything seems to be underweight. Low battery can show as lower result on some scales
Fun fact: a US nickel weighs 5.000g, and 5 US quarters weigh 1.0000oz
From the mint yes, dont try this with a circulated coin though lol
Woah- intentionally?
If so, that’s amazing. What a clever idea
I need to start using old batteries in my bathroom scale.
I use no batteries and am very happy with what it displays.
