I bought 175 g pack of salami which had 162 g of salami as well.
It’s far more likely that this is just weight variation which is allowable per the Food Safety and Inspection Service
However, I would sooner blame the scale itself as it doesn’t look like a scientific scale. So it’s likely not calibrated and will drift over time. Plenty of things could explain an 8g difference as measured by the average joe.
If I’m reading table 2-9 right this package would be allowed to be under by 28.3g
Yeah that seems to be how it reads.
Weird that heavier packages are allowed a smaller tolerance ? Like a 198g package can be 28g under, but in the last row anything over 4.5kg needs to vary by less than 1%
If it weren’t obscenely expensive to do so, it would make sense for all scales to be calibrated to a NIST traceable standard, with periodic recalibrations at preset intervals.
Most kitchen scales could be easily calibrated with a measuring cup and water if they really wanted to do this. Just have a few included cups for 25,50,100ml of water and then fill them on the scale and tell it what the volume is.
That will easily get you within a gram of error for most common food weights.
