Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Measuring Fraud?

I was just working on a recipe. It calls for 16oz of Hershey's chocolate syrup. I asked my husband to pick up a bottle that had at least that much in it.

The bottle said 24 oz on the packaging. Since I only needed 16 oz, I poured it into a measuring cup. Two cups = 16 oz, right? Well...yes and no.

In this case, the bottle was empty once I hit the 2 cup mark on the measuring cup. So where did the other 8 oz go?

It turns out that we measure ounces by WEIGHT as well as VOLUME. And Hersheys, being really smart, knows that if they put the weight (24 oz) on the bottle, dummies like me who HATED math as it was and whose intellect was further insulted by the insane system of measurement in this country would be fooled into thinking they'd have enough for 1.5 batches of awesome chocolate mint brownies.

Oh well. It's not technically fraud, but it is very annoying. Makes one yearn for the metric system.

I'll post photos and recipe when they're done...it's a 3 stage process but oh so very worth it!

3 comments:

quilly said...

To me it is a question of integrity. I am sad to discover Hershey's is on the wrong side, but I am not surprised.

Susan at Stony River said...

I thought all food was sold by weight because of settling--but then I live in Metricland, so it doesn't matter LOL

What gets on my nerves is the supermarkets who put labels for comparison prices and then mix up the parameters, like one brand of toilet tissue being measured by weight and the next by sheet. Pffft. You're right, you have to be a math wiz to go grocery shopping, it's nuts.

Anonymous said...

No wonder I hated math. Thanks for sharing this.