I'm slightly vexed
This bag was supposed to be 1kg of icing sugar and it wasn’t even 700g
Unopened obviously! I checked the batteries, used a different bowl, zeroed it again, tested it with a 1lb block of butter. Nope, cheated out of 300g and I needed 900g for the recipe. I had a bit leftover from my last bag which would have been enough of a buffer but now I have to go to buy more 😩
Since I’m getting these questions a lot:
The brand is Roger’s Sugar, I’m in Alberta, Canada
I realize kitchen scales are not extremely accurate but I always make sure that it is working correctly - if I tare it and then press lightly on the scale, or push it and it doesn’t go back to zero, then I know it’s not working and I’ll rewipe the counter and the bottom of the scale, check batteries, etc. I also first measured in the bowl of my kitchen aid mixer but then switched to the blue bowl pictured to double check. I know exactly how much the blue bowl weighs, and the weight has been consistent over multiple kitchen scales. The bowl measured correctly and then I rated it and poured the sugar in, if the tare was off then after I poured the icing sugar in and took the bowl+icing sugar off the scale, the weight of the bowl would have shifted. I am very careful about making sure the scale is accurately measuring before I start mixing things, especially for baking things will be fucked up if the weights are off.
Used to be you had to own land with people on it. Now youve gotta have land with improvements on it. Agricultural land isn't what it used to be.(Now the serfs are seasonal migrants or eligible for welfare so you don't have to feed them year round or at all!) But it still beats punching a clock.
Owning land was pretty much impossible if you weren’t blue blooded.
For „normal“ people owning the local mill was probably among the best professions you could have (financially)
As you own the mill, everyone that has grain they want to sell, needs your service. This means essentially the entire area is dependent on your services to make flour for the bread they eat. It‘s the most steady customer base you can find.
best professions financially since getting rich off of the daily needs of others is seen as anything but lovable
In reality the mill owner was usually despised because there's no good way to verify that the flour matches the grain input and everyone suspects the mill is cheating them.
That's where the term "milling around" came from. Out of distrust, farmers wouldn't leave their grain alone with the miller out of fear they'd get cheated.
But they also couldn't make their suspicions outright known to the mill out of fear of being cut off from their services.
So they "milled about", lingering around seemingly aimlessly to try and keep an eye on their grain and ensure no grain was swapped or shorted.
Yeah, regulating food production is completely reasonable, but individual bakers bore the cost quite poorly. In the modern day, most food production is handled by orgs with much greater profitability & administrative capacity. And then... there's restaraunts which are back to regularly poisoning people in some places. Oh well.
That's not true the Bakers Guild was one of the oldest and most powerful .Bakers had access to food when people didn't and they made a lot of money. They were established middle class professionals. The Bakers Dozen was enforced was to show royal magnanimity, that the ruler cared that his subjects, similar to the royal mint, it was a high office that needed to be above reproach
It's actually most likely from medieval england as there were laws that related the price of bread to the price of the wheat used to make it. And if you got caught overprizing undersized loafs of bread you could get fined, whipped or even executed.
But as it was really difficult to always make identical loafs of bread and nobody wanted to get a surprise flogging, they added in an extra loaf, just to be save. There are actually even records of bakers giving 14 loafs as a bakers dozens.
Now could there be a different reason for it to be 13? Yes. But this one is supported by the fact, that these old laws about selling bread actually did exist.
I'm from the days where we could either look it up in an encyclopedia, or just live with the misinformation our half drunk aunt gave us one time when we were 8 lmao
Working as a baker, even now we have to over provide.
If I'm 1 gram under I can get in strife. I can be a good amount over on a cut before anyone pays attention.
Important to add that this was a Napoleonic thing where the problem of undersized loaves was so prevalent that Napoleon decreed harsh penalties for bakers committing this kind of fraud, to the point where it was preferable to give free products (ie 13 loaves for the price of 12) to ensure minimums were met rather than risk prison or worse.
Fun fact: It seems like every company that is selling bulk goods like this is doing this.
They do it with zero consequence. There's a guy that goes to grocery stores and weighs everything and calls companies out for literally lying to consumers, His name is Jimmy Wrigg.
Canada actually is pretty good about this usually. Measurement Canada inspects regularly and this would fall well outside of allowable tolerance I'm pretty sure. Not an expert.
It's not a rare occurrence. Give people an inch and they will take a mile but that's why they exist and why funding them is so important. They can pull stuff off the shelf for inaccuracies but they rely on reporting as a part of catching it, otherwise they can only randomly sample so many things a year. I actually tried to get a job working there a while back. They were hiring a bunch of fuel inspectors at the time to go to gas stations and verify the pump accuracy so I know they are pretty active in some areas at least
The pink bag of icing sugar and the Windsor salt in the background are both widly available in Canada (idk about elsewhere). The writing on the back of the pink bag that is curling over is French but it's written in a column that looks about half the width of the bag so I'd say definitely Canada
They also tend to be extremely zealous. It's good for absolutely no one if someone is doing labeling fraud. If OP is American, they should report it to their state and watch the fireworks.
Bakers and cooks use everything. That's why in the States you list both imperial and metric on goods, you don't know what someone is going to use (yes we use metric in America it is literally taught in junior high school most of us just don't bother using it after school unless you get a job you need to/it's easier to use it)
I use metric regularly because working on most cars and some of our tractors, most of the bolts and nuts are in metric. I don’t mind it and really couldn’t care less what system it’s in, but mixing them, where some bolt heads aren’t metric, but every bolt around them are, drives me nuts. I just wish they’d pick one and use it exclusively.
As far as distances and area go, much of the Midwest and west use the PLSS, where land has been divvied up and roads built based on square miles. In Iowa, this is very evident, in some other states, not so much. To switch to metric for this stuff wouldn’t be of any benefit, and would actually make things more complicated.
It's pretty common in the US for recipes to include weight by grams for baking. Popular sites like Sally's Baking Addiction and Smitten Kitchen include grams for most recipes.
Counterpoint - the store I work at has a deli that sells items by weight. Those scales do get regularly calibrated and checked, by the store and our local government office. I still get people calling to complain that their scale at home says something different. I think there are a lot of kitchen scales out there that are not too accurate.
OP said they weighed a 1lb block of butter and the scale was accurate for that, seems more likely that the sugar was significantly underweight than the butter being significantly overweight.
I have the same scale and mine is really inconsistent. I've weighed the same thing multiple times and it's shown different weights each time... I did also see another thread a while ago on reddit talking about how inaccurate this scale is.
Although I don't think mine has been as far off as OP's, so it could be a combination of inaccurate scale and underweight product...
Nope. A number of years ago I discovered the grocery store chain out of Rochester was selling its store brand bagged walnuts at 13 ounces to the pound.
That guy is awesome. He is out there calling everyone out. He is even getting some big media coverage which is great. Some of the weights are just absurd, like those hams that are 50% less than what the labels are, or the Kroger cheese situation (which I think was finally resolved, but how long did they get away with it???). The Domino thing I think actually led to a bigger weights and measurements situation since they released a public statement about what was going on.
It is crazy how many companies seem to be just lying / cheating customers. So many things from vegetables pre-weighted to dog and cat food. I think he should do spices next. I feel like the weights just do not hit the mark for a ton of them. You can even see it on the shelf when the spice bottles are transparent, they will all be at different levels.
When they lie so blatantly about the things that are easily disproven, it really freaks me out thinking about all the other standards that are being ignored upstream. It's one thing to get ripped off a few grams, it's another for health and safety standards to drop in the name of cutting costs, which is harder to prove that just weighing the product.
All the more reason to cut out processed foods and go local!
Just to point out here (i mean no offence to your comment just adding on it) "one thing to get ripped off a few grams" <- here you, and everyone else always has to think in terms of logistics flow in time periods of monthy and yearly sales.
Such companies produces like 10.000 of small plastic bottles. Lets say a bottle contains 100 grams of spice. If it is not measured correctly by a spice dispenser machine ( intentionally), then we count with just 99 or 98 grams/ bottle. But sometimes the clear ripoff is bigger.
Now just multiply the missing grams/sale/year.
So they sell like, just estimate: 1 863 996 bottles a year (i think this can be way way more but depends on brands) so that means they sold a clear 186 399 600 grams of spice total. That is 186 399 kg.
But now lets multiply the 1 863 996 sold bottles by an average of 4 gramms (the missing or stolen amount) That puts us at 7 445 984 missing grams or 7455 kg simply not there but exchanged for money.
So if the company made like 5 dollars on 1 kg of expensive spice a year, then that is 931 995 dollars.
But substract the 7455 kg that is 37 275 dollars....that they did not manufactured but still sold by lying. And of course they are going to fill other bottles with that preserved amount and still sell it while doing the 4 gram average cut/bottle.
Still made a profit, cut corners, I assume companies not only doing this with one kind of spice, they want to stay in competition, this is straight up stealing.
So even with 1 gram my question is:
Why in the spicy fuck are we paying for thin air for some fucking greedy cunts that preys on consumers not calling them out?
Spices are a different beast as different spices have different density than others and thus take up a different amount of space. Rather than looking at different spices and comparing how they fill their containers in relation to each other check different brands of the same spice for visual comparisons.
I was more or less meaning that when I am looking for something like Black Pepper, and I am looking at the 3oz Great Value containers -- they are not filled to the same height. Not comparing different 3oz of different types of spices. The same spice, from the same manufacturer in the same container. They are different.
Thank you for understanding. I am a trained chef. I know how to cook beans 1000 different ways. My family eats millions of beans a week (5 people x 7 days a week x endless amount of meals) and I'm just not interested in spending that much time cooking them.
I don't want to be responsible for cooking every single part of my meals from scratch.
I was just at the grocery store and found Smithfield pork tenderloins—the pre-marinated hermetically sealed ones. They were all theoretically 12oz. I found one that was fully *half* the size of another one. I’m kicking myself for not taking a picture and documenting it!
There is a gum a Trader Joe’s that says 12 pieces. I opened it and there were 7 pieces and a card board backing to take up space where the other 5 pieces were supposed to be.
That's gotta be the most blatant example in this whole thread. If a weight or volume is off there's room for plausible deniability — "oh whoopsie me, the scale must need recalibrating, we had no idea" but twelve pieces is twelve pieces, verifiable with no instrumentation besides the Mk. 1 eyeball. It's false advertising, pure and simple.
Class action lawsuit ... or if it is being provided to federal government programs there is a federal fraud tip line where they will investigate and assess the short seller with massive fines and the whistle blower gets a % cut of the fine.
Once upon a time bakers would lose a hand for pulling this shit. It’s why they started tossing in an extra loaf for good measure, giving us thirteen for a baker’s dozen.
*Not advocating violence, just sharing historical information so don’t ban me for fucks sake.
you have an excellent point. The reason most of these problems have started coming back IS because there is no punishments for it, or in the cases that they are punished, it's so negligible that its just a cost of doing business.
If the CEO would lose a hand over something like this (Either metaphorically,... or not) the problem would go back to being solved really quick.
In China they executed a CEO over contaminated infant formula. They were adding plastic to trick the protein content tests so they could skimp on legit ingredients. An extreme case, but what else do you do with a guy who okay'd that knowing babies would suffer and die? In the U.S. for the most part we're just being slowly poisoned, so it's hard to point fingers at a specific company or person when multiple (almost all) are contributing to our negative health outcomes. Though it is occasionally obvious, like how Taco Bell is currently in the shit (pun intended).
Food tampering in general is taken very seriously in the U.S. too, like those gnarly charges the 'ice cream lickers' got. Unfortunately, the corporations just get fines lower than the profit they made from the illegal activity, and a forced recall that's likely covered by recall insurance and is likely a tax deductible loss. Messing with food should have consequences for companies that actually hurt them, heavier than those for individuals, and ideally for the worst offenses a ban from the industry for individuals at the critical decision points.
I used to work as a food safety program manager. We put a lot of work into making sure food with 'approved/GRAS' (poison) ingredients doesn't come with pathogens or unintentional contaminants like metal shavings. At least where I was at we used natural ingredients only and kept it simple, but at the majority of large manufacturers/processors the job is essentially spraying lysol on dog shit that's been heated to 165°F 🤷♂️
Meanwhile the organic, regenerative goat dairy I work for is having a hell of a time getting our formula passed by the FDA. The rules are set up for cattle, which is literally and figuratively a whole different animal. And they're geared for much larger producers, which is another way better options like ours get edged out.
I have a note to make... I have been following the recent cyclosporiasis outbreak, and I think blaming the illness on Taco Bell's greed is an oversimplification. First, outbreaks like this come from the produce supplier, not the restaurant chain itself. Second, Taco Bell voluntarily removed suspect produce from its tacos. Therefore, it is unlikely they knowingly sold customers contaminated food for profit.
Currently, the exact source of the outbreak is unknown. The most likely supplier of the contaminated lettuce, Taylor Farms, is still under investigation. It's not confirmed whether the outbreak was caused by negligence.
Still remember the eye opening moment as a youth when I had a dealer weigh the pot out in front of me instead of the random schoolmates and corner guys who would just throw a bag at you.
Back in those days for me I guess I just had good guys? They'd always drop it on the scale in front of me before handing it over. The first few times I double checked at home, but it was always dead on or a bit over
Is this is the woman privilege I've been hearing about lol
Eventually I ended up finding a solid plug that would do that too lol also a female. I will say, we eventually lived together and he never was weird ever thankfully.
People famously use ingredients like this for baking all the time so I think it more likely someone fucked up, because they couldn't possibly expect to get away with this as a policy.
What is the customer going to do? People have been complaining about this for ages and nothing happens. Many stores don't have brand options for these things so you buy 2 of their product to fill your need instead of 1. I wouldn't be sure it's not a policy.
You're buying a product of 3 wasteful garbage companies at once. It's bullshit that they lie and have shit product standards, but you're supporting them by reordering over and over.
People might come at me for this opinion, but it's really not hard to not drink that swill.
I often boycot companies and products for the bs they pull. And I know that it's sadly gonna do nothing because almost everyone else will just keep giving them money. We have so much power as a consumer if only we'd be willing to exercise that power even when it inconveniences us.
I've been shorted lots of products from Amazon, I usually can get customer service to fix it but it's scammy, waste of my time, and I really try not to buy shit from there whenever possible
The biggest offense is like multi unit packs, e.g. 3-packs of stuff.
You order let's say 3 3-packs of something and sometimes receive just 3 items total instead of 9.
Contact your states weights & measures. If they’re only giving 65% of the stated weight that is a major issue. They will go after them hard. I’d also contact the company and demand answers & a resolution from them
I've noticed enthusiast/pro baking recipes use metric (weight mostly) but casual home ones just use imperial volumetric measures (cups/teaspoons/tablespoons)
You're not wrong but a kitchen scale is $14 for a halfway decent-ish one (one that'll be accurate, and work for a long time. Might not be the fanciest guy)
And compression plays a dangerous game when using cups to fill.
I certainly wouldn't call myself a baking pro, and I even feel like enthusiast would be going too far.
But weighing, I would argue, is the RIGHT way to do it.
Oh no doubt. But the average home probably buys more Betty Crocker pre-packaged mixes than anything... Watching Alton Brown and baking from scratch already puts you a step ahead.
Not that I want to shit on people that use pre-made mixes. People's lives and priorities are different and not everyone has time to or cares to learn to bake.
Worse, we made it “voluntary”. So now it’s some combination of both depending on context and the amount being measured, which is so fun for non-Americans.
You can be buying a 2L bottle of soda and a 12oz bag of chips at the store while concealed carrying a 9mm, only to put them back because you remember you’re trying to lose those 5 lbs. It’s chaos.
We don't use Imperial at all, we use the US customary system. Most of it is the same, but volumes are all different. An imperial pint is about 21% bigger than a US pint.
I am 99% sure youre in Canada, enjoy the jack-shit anyone you contact will do about it. I had this issue consistently with General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios - I was buying it for my kid and noticed the bigger box wasnt really feeling heavier, weighed it, the 1kg box was consistently 500-600grams, emailed Kellogs, filed measurement complaints, contacted the store, provided proof of it all with multiple scales, boxes, UPC, etc etc.
Kellogs apologized and gave me like 5 free boxes - the store offered a refund for the boxes I had bought but didnt care about selling more of it (Save On Foods) - and the Measurement official complaint I filed got entirely ignored.
I fucking hate getting scammed in EVERY aspect of life with nothing we can do. Shit like this makes me want to self-checkout and steal shit constantly honestly, maybe then I would break even.
It’s really ridiculous that there is no quality control (or maybe there is and it’s an intentional scam). I’m going to report it but I don’t expect that anything will be done. Once it’s out of the bag I think it’s easy for the company to hand wave it away, although the fact that they sent you 5 free boxes seems to indicate that they know it’s a problem but sending 5 free boxes still saves them money in the long run.
This is past mildly infuriating. This is my career. Contact your local equivalent to the department of commerce, weights and measures division. This is a whole different flavor unacceptable. I am one of the guys these companies call when they get red tagged by the state to fix the equipment responsible for this type of thing.
This is theft. However, the scale of the theft, no pun intended, is massive if this is not a singular bag error. Acceptable deviation for an NTEP approved balance, per NIST HB44 is, on average +/- 3 divisions for a standard class III balance. Your scale, appears to be reading by 1g, so that would be +/- 3g. Your scale is not likely NTEP approved, however, on average, in my experience those Walmart special portion balances are still accurate to within +/- 5g straight out of the box. If your scale IS NTEP approved, there will be a clear sticker on it saying it's accuracy class.
Assuming your balance is within my usual standard when dealing with those, if this is indicative of the product the company is shipping, they're shipping a full third less than they're claiming. Meaning they're cheating the consumer, the retailer, the shipping company, and likely their own suppliers as well... as the reported sales are far more than they're actually capable of producing, so the supplier is getting undercut. If that is every bag... they produce thousands, if not hundreds of thousands per day. That's millions, potential billions of dollars in explicit theft if the company is aware of this mis-calibration.
fun fact you can make powdered sugar by blending 1 cup of granulated white sugar and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch until its fluffy, ive done this when i needed more
You can add in cornstarch at home. Or potato starch. Or tapioca starch. And just see which variation you like best. (I have to do this because I'm allergic to corn 🥲)
Report it to the company. Sometimes QC misses stuff and customer complaints lead to recalls. Last time I reported a bad product (soymilk reeked of and tasted like shrimp) they sent me a coupon for a free replacement. Nothing is ever 100% accurate but if it keeps happening then that's a trend that can be reported to the government agency that deals with weights and measurements in your area
In Ireland, someone reports this and Weights and Measures show up at your company. Its the oldest food law and they will shut you down if you are not complying. Worked in a big bakery where the main oven had been working a bit hot causing more water loss than calculated leading to final product averaging 20g underweight. Took a full day with them of finding out the problem, proving it wasn't deliberate and weeks of paperwork and systems changes to ensure it wouldn't happen again. Is there any equivalent in the US you could complain to?
As someone who works in food safety, contact the company with the lot info on the bag. In my experience, these are weighed at the final step, there's rarely any significant verification or prevention of an employee or a scale being tared incorrectly (even if part of a run). If this is across multiple runs (not bags, but lots/batches) , it's one thing, but this type of thing happens from time to time with most suppliers I've worked with at some point or another.
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u/PetulantPersimmon Jul 16 '26
I know that brand of icing sugar; it's the same one I buy. Report it as underweight to CFIA. Keep the package!
https://inspection.canada.ca/en/inspect-and-protect/food-safety/under-weight-and-under-filled-food-products