I bought a bag of Doritos the other day. The front of the bag said 25 grams more. It certainly looked like a very big bag of Doritos.
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| The bag looks gigantic, but those who are expecting a ton of Doritos will be disappointed when they open the bag. |
But when I opened the bag, it was only half full.
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| This is not the bag after I had a snack attack. This is what it looked like when I opened it. What a waste of packaging! |
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| The fill line is where my thumb is. So what's the point of the other half of the bag? Do we just want extra garbage for the landfill (after all this package is not even recyclable)? |
Why do companies like Frito-Lay (who makes Doritos), insist on using giant packages and only filling them part way? They would save money if they used packages that fit the amount of product being sold, instead of something much bigger than is needed. I know that they think that they're fooling us into buying things by making them look bigger than they are, but once the consumer opens the package and sees that they've been shortchanged and duped, they're going to be annoyed (and you know the saying, fool me once . . .) . So why don't these companies just use less packaging and therefore less resources. The way things are now, we're just all annoyed by companies thinking that consumers are idiots and by the overpackaging that's going on in the world.
Its done for a reason... “Slack fill” is an intentional choice by snack makers who want to protect their delicate products from the damage of rough handling during the shipping process. When products are stacked atop one another, crammed into tight spaces, or simply jostled around in the back of a delivery truck, slack fill serves as an air cushion that prevents potato chips from becoming potato crumbs.
ReplyDeleteRepresentatives from companies like Frito-Lay do claim that under filling bags and packages or "slack fill" leads to less breakage of chips and other items, however, packages have become bigger and bigger over the years and less and less full. Was chip breakage such a problem a decade or two ago that now we need giant cushioned bags to protect our chips?
ReplyDeleteThere have been class action lawsuits over misleading packaging over the years and some consumer groups offer "awards" to companies who are the most wasteful with their packaging. Enforcement for overpackaging is difficult and rarely done. Leeway in regulations prevents innovations in packaging by allowing companies to stay with the status quo as long as they can roughly justify their giant packages under one of the rules. Only the most outrageous violations are pursued, which is a shame because in the end we all lose.
Can't we as a society figure out any other way to prevent chips from becoming crumbs? Further can't we somehow make the packaging either recyclable or biodegradable?