this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
818 points (87.5% liked)

Mildly Infuriating

35045 readers
1 users here now

Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.

I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!

It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.


Rules:

1. Be Respectful


Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.

Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.

...


2. No Illegal Content


Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.

That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals

-No CSA content or Revenge Porn

-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)

...


3. No Spam


Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.

-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.

-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.

-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers

-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.

...


4. No Porn/ExplicitContent


-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.

-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.

...


5. No Enciting Harassment,Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts


-Do not Brigade other Communities

-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.

-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.

-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.

...


6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.


-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.

...


7. Content should match the theme of this community.


-Content should be Mildly infuriating.

-At this time we permit content that is infuriating until an infuriating community is made available.

...


8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.


-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.

...

...


Also check out:

Partnered Communities:

1.Lemmy Review

2.Lemmy Be Wholesome

3.Lemmy Shitpost

4.No Stupid Questions

5.You Should Know

6.Credible Defense


Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.

All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 78 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

http://www.foodconsulting.com/q&a.htm

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

5/16 oz out of 5 oz is just over 6%.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! I don't get why they use such weird measurements. Why not use %?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Probably because, as evidenced by most others' attempts to do simple arithmetic in this thread, percentages are even more difficult to calculate.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

5/80

Easy 😎

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Congratulations

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

A lot of American stuff has English French and Spanish so it can cover the whole continent basically

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Do Americans set their scales to metric?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

I do as well - just because I live in a backwards country doesn’t mean I have to be backwards too

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

USDA contractor here, we use metric on the scales we use day to day.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why is the basic arithmetic in this thread so terrible?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's not necessarily a conspiracy. They're all just doing it because it's easy and there's plausible deniability.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

TBH, I was hungover a piss, and was like fuck it.