I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.
wouldnt weight slightly fluctuate with moisture content?
yeah. 8g is a tiny weight difference here and could easily be accounted-for due to humidity with pasta. it’s about the weight of 3-4 strands of that 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.
Shrinkflation is definitely a thing, but this isn’t a good example.
So they package it wet? If the weight went down it means the pasta was wetter at time of boxing.
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Would have doesn’t mean is. Source
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 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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Weigh another one with the package and see if it matches to what it says on the package. Use the produce weight scale at the store so you don’t have to buy two of them. I have a suspicion that you’re buying the package. But then if that’s the case then those meat moisture absorbers also will add a lot of weight when it comes to buying meat.
Could be worth checking your scale, if everything seems to be underweight. Low battery can show as lower result on some scales
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.
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.
Thank you! I don’t get why they use such weird measurements. Why not use %?
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.
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
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…
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.
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
