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Comment by kwertyoowiyop | Hacker News Reader

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kwertyoowiyop

It’s a pretty expensive meal too, especially with all the boxes being just half filled. :-(

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"Sold by weight, not volume."

And often containing less weight at the same cost via shrinkflation.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/23/business/shrinkflation-pr...

I swear most of the comments on HN become this weird “how can I respond to this statement and connect the conversation to something negative even if it’s completely off topic”.

Skepticism cosplays as wisdom on the internet.

It hardly seemed off-topic, given the misinterpretation of the topic introduced here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37540818

I know this isn't what you're saying, but I'm amused at the notion of a hypothetical person thinking that containers could leave the factory filled to 120% of volume so that they're at 100% of volume after settling, if only manufacturers would stop being greedy or something.

Is it really that expensive or impractical to settle the contents of cereal boxes (and potato chip bags) on the assembly line so they aren’t 20-40% air? I assumed that the fill level was something that manufactures co-evolved to — based on what their major competitors are doing and what they can get away with.

Yes, it requires sustained mechanical agitation for a period of time that you can't really accelerate without severely damaging the product. Add to that that you really can't start settling the product until _after_ its in the container. Maybe you oversize the bag, leave it open while settling (keep in mind that the atmosphere in the container is frequently not room air), before finally sealing and trimming off the excess? Or you could skip all that and just ship the same amount of product, using the same amount of packaging, and save the energy input and cycle time needed to pre-settle the product.

Potato chip bags are deliberately inflated with nitrogen. This preserves them (oxygen causes chips to go stale) and it protects them in shipping. The air pressure acts as a shock absorber. If they tightly packed these bags with product then a lot of it would be crushed into tiny crumbs.

It costs them money to ship a bunch of air to the stores. They can’t fit nearly as much product on a truck this way. They do it because it improves product quality, not because they’re trying to rip people off.

There’s one thing to not have chips bags tightly packed and another to have them a tiny amount of chips and the rest nitrogen filler. I think manufacturers got a bit too greedy at this point…

A big reason why they do it so that the contents don’t get crushed from the factory to the consumer. You fill the bag with air to cushion it.

And oats are very cheap

"half filled" is an extremely generous description, when the contents of the breakfast cereal box are carefully engineered to be ~95% air by volume, no matter how well-settled.

(Yes, I know about Grape-Nuts, and other cereals with far higher densities.)

Correction, with ~real numbers:

- A few web sites say American (breakfast) cereal boxes are roughly 12" x 8" x 2" - so 192 cu. in., or ~3,150 cu. cm.

- Similarly, the product weight for a standard box of Cap'n Crunch(tm) cereal seems to be ~12oz. - so ~340g. (Frosted Flakes(tm), Cheerios(tm), and many others look pretty close to this.)

Divide those figures, and we get ~0.11g/cu. cm.

The actual density of carbohydrates is ~1.5g/cu. cm.

So, with a generous allowance for settling, I should have said "engineered to be ~92% air by volume".

More interesting: A couple searches say that wheat, from a farmer's PoV, is currently selling for ~$5.75 per bushel. And the standard wheat bushel weighs 60 pounds. So an "all-grain" breakfast cereal should yield ~80 12-oz. boxes from that $5.75 bushel of wheat...or about 7.2 cents per box.

Far, far better to be a big corporate middle-man than an American farmer or consumer, eh?

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