Is your food lighter than it claims?

I agree that giving a minimum weight would be useful. That would encourage us to go to Trading Standards if we are short-changed. I believe that it is illegal for a barman to give you more alcohol than we pay for but I am not aware of other examples.

We still use the term ‘baker’s dozen’, dating from a time when bakers used to give thirteen items when we ordered twelve. Going back to our history books may be the way forward.

I was told that bakers added such things as chalk so they managed to make 13 loaves from the flour for 12. I don’t think we ever left that era.

wavechange, you are in danger of opening old wounds with you bakers dozen – remember the “Is now the time to ditch imperial and go fully metric?” conversation? The quantity should now perhaps be 11.

Selling in quantities of ten makes it easy to work out the price of a single item. Eggs are often sold in packs of ten.

It would help the consumer if products such as the ones illustrated in Shefalee’s introduction were sold in a multiple of 100g. So full marks for the 400g can of Heinz soup but not for the 285g of sweetcorn or 420g of peach slices. It would make sense to move to 300g of sweetcorn and 400g of peach slices. If these were minimum weights, so much the better.

Excellent idea, but perhaps can-size standardisation has something to do with it and the relative densities of different products. As I said earlier, the deficiency tolerance [and breaches of it] make a mockery of the unit pricing system.

Of course you are right about the nature of the product, John, and it would not make sense to sell English mustard in 400g quantities, like canned soup. For mustard, perhaps 50g and 100g jars would be useful preferred sizes.

With some products such as instant coffee, the common sizes are 100g, 200g and 300g irrespective of manufacturer. A confirmed tea drinker might have a 50g jar for the benefit of visitors, but most buyers buy the sizes I mentioned.

For milk, I suggest 0.5, 1 and 2 litres. It’s time to get rid of strange quantities such as 1.135 litres and 2.27 litres.

I go along with that. A modular system would make life simpler. As happens already with some tinned fruit, cans could have the same circumference but be shorter or taller according to the contents and preferred quantities but all be graduated to sensible common units [multiples of 50g]. It’s interesting that when we had cats we noticed that all the cat food tins were the same size but the weights differed quite considerably across different brands making value comparisons tricky [this was before unit pricing was common on shelf edge labels], so accommodating different densities can be done. With goods in other packaging the restrictions of standardised cylindrical cans do not apply: every manufacturer [and brand] can still have their own distinctive shape in glass or plastic but still follow the modular weight/volume/quantity standard. If you look at washing-up liquids at the moment, the variety of contents volumes across the brands is quite bizarre and the actual amounts seem to make no sense at all – I suspect it’s all done to confuse us over special offers which always seem to come in unique and unrelated quantities. Perhaps it would be argued that the concentration rates for different products packed on the same production lines in identically shaped containers have something to do with it but I see little evidence of that in practice. And I hardly dare mention toothpaste tubes which are almost beyond comparison by virtue of the haphazard sizing [and then they’re boxed in such a way that makes it even more difficult to judge visually]. Unit pricing is the shopper’s safety net but, as we know from other Conversations on the relationship between price and pack-size, errors are commonplace because of the complexity. And putting less product in the same size container for the same price has become an important element of the retailers’ black arts [not forgetting that an identical container in a pound shop will not necessarily contain the same quantity as the same product in a different store, which I am sure fools many customers]. On milk, I think I am correct in saying that the smallest bottles are basically still pints but marked with their metric equivalents!

I expect we will have to carry on wishing for preferred sizes of cans and jars, because any attempt to decrease the amount we were buying would not go unnoticed. We might be better to push for minimum weights, as suggested by Malcolm. When goods are weighed out for the customer, the amount is never underweight and sometimes rather generous.

I was pretending not to understand the strange quantities that milk is often sold in, though I don’t pretend to understand why this is still going on in 2015. Bottled beer generally comes in 0.5 litre measures these days and pubs in the north often supply a generous 0.5 litres in quaint glasses marked ‘Pint’.

Perhaps if we all turn up at the supermarket with an electronic kitchen scale and start weighing the packets as we progress round the store. Even though we cannot measure the weight of the contents of a package, the gross weight will let us select the ones that offer the best value for money and the some others that might interest Trading Standards.

You do need to keep an eye on the till operator if they weigh products to price them at the checkout. They don’t always take their hands off the product so it could cost you more.

I remember when you had to weigh and price up your fruit and veg before you got to the till. One machine had a queue of people waiting at it while the other was free. The reason? The word soon got round that one weighed less than the other !!!

On many occasions I have pointed out that a weighing machine has not been levelled, as apparent from the built-in spirit level. No-one has shown the slightest interest in taking action, even when there was a prominent notice pointing out the need for levelling before use.

Fortunately modern electronic machines are capable of sufficiently accurate weighing when not levelled, unlike their mechanical predecessors.

The sellers don’t check them either, obviously, yet they are not getting what they are paying for and will have to defend themselves if it comes to court. Perhaps they think they can just pass the blame over to the manufacturers, and in this crazy world maybe they can. “Call The Man from Del Monte!” [He usually says “YES” but probably not on this occasion.]

Hi Bob – I suggest you contact Citizens Advice and see what they advise: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk

Which? raised this issue earlier in the year: https://conversation.which.co.uk/food-drink/underweight-supermarket-food-cans-tins-weight-grams/

Hi Mary – From official guidance for business: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/487018/Guidance_-_The_Weights_and_Measures__Packaged_Goods__Regulations_2006_v.4_December_2015.pdf

The Packers’ Rules
14. The Directive sets out three rules with which packers must comply:
– the actual contents of the packages should not be less, on average, than the nominal quantity;
– the proportion of packages which are short of the stated quantity by a defined amount (the “tolerable negative error” or TNE) should be less than a specified level; and
– no package should be short by more than twice the TNE.

In your case the TNE on 1000g is 1.5% or 15g and no package should be short by more than 30g. At 914g, yours is a Lidl short of the minimum of 970g. I will be interested to see what they have to say about this.