Can it be a little more?

Only very few consumers examine their shopping from the supermarket thoroughly to check that the contents correspond to that stated on the packaging. Or do you place your tin on the scales and then deduct the weight of the empty, clean metal tin including the lid? There are modern systems such as the HEUFT SPECTRUM which can measure the fill level exactly but how can the consumer be sure that these are really used?

The consumer is protected in this respect (most are unaware of this) by the legislator and the so-called packaging regulations.
This protection has to be observed by each filling plant and forces those concerned to keep their promises if they do not wish to risk severe fines.
Fortunately the legislator is not so naive as to demand that simply every package must contain the nominal volume printed on it but takes into account, in view of the large number of items and the high clock-pulse rate involved during filling, that a fair compromise must be made between the wishes of the consumer and what is technically feasible.

To this end three simple requirements are made which must be fulfilled each time products are checked.

We will take a bottle with a nominal volume of one litre as an example.

1. On average the volume must not be less than the nominal volume.
   In this way the precept of fairness has been kept to in mathematical terms. Every consumer who buys this product regularly will on average receive the correct amount for his money and the filling plant does not have to supply more than promised.
2. The products are divided into different categories according to their nominal volumes. A permissible "minus deviation" is defined for each of these categories. Only a small number of the products produced may be below this minus threshold.
   In this example (1 l) this minus deviation would be 15 ml.
3. The minus deviation for any product intended for sale must not fall below the above-mentioned minus deviation multiplied by two. In other words under no circumstances must a bottle in a supermarket contain less than 970 ml. These last two points take into account the fact that the critical consumer does not wish to be taken to the cleaners even when making single purchases. Consequently extremely underfilled bottles would remain on the supermarket shelf and not be purchased.

The filling plant therefore has demands made on it to constantly check these three points and to fulfil them during production. The HEUFT SYSTEMTECHNIK GMBH company offers the HEUFT SPECTRUM in order to implement this. This system can determine the fill level in the most varied ways (e.g. high frequency or X-ray measurement) and check that it keeps to the pre-determined guidelines. In this way on the one hand individual bottles which do not correspond to points 2 and 3 are removed from the production flow and on the other hand if the device is equipped with optional statistic evaluation modules the total mean value of the filling process is monitored at all times. The latter in particular can be set very accurately using the visualized evaluations because the mean value can be determined very precisely by means of the extensive statistics. Following this value exactly is important in order to keep the balance between on the one hand providing the consumer with the correct filling quantity and on the other hand not pushing up production costs due to unintentional overfilling.

The basis for a fair relationship between the filling plant and the consumer can be created with the HEUFT SPECTRUM. A relationship which helps to satisfy the wishes of the consumer as well as those of the producer.