Hacker News Reader

Comment by glimcat | Hacker News Reader

"The point here is that while technical options exist to prevent premature opening of the bag, such as reducing the initial air pressure in the bag, attempting to add this to the existing processing equipment would be a nightmare. So it was necessary to increase the seal strength."

You could also reduce the air pressure in the factory, e.g. by building it in one of the aforementioned high-altitude regions.

View on HN

True, however there would be a trade off with chip cooking times, no? If water boils at a much lower temperature at high altitude, then I assume oil would as well.

But then again, you could cook your chips in pressurized vessels a la Kentucky Fried Chicken. But you'd still have to truck all your potatoes up into the mountains. Decisions, decisions...

And/or heat up the air filling the bag. As air cools, the volume decreases.

The right solution would be to squeeze to depress the bag a bit as it's sealed. Increasing the seal strength is a quick and dirty hack, but as we've all learned too well from software, the right solutions often got trumped by quick and dirty hacks. The customers just have to live with the consequence.

Your ideas have other suboptimal consequences though - sucked-in bags don't look as nice on the shelf, and in fact they look smaller. This makes them less attractive and thus less likely to be purchased.

That would be even more expensive than upgrading a bunch of equipment. The whole point is that the solution had to be retrofit onto existing facilities at minimal cost.

Building an entire new set of factories in a mountain region where there are, generally speaking, fewer residents to staff your factory is a pretty expensive decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com