An urgent warning has been issued to shoppers who could be left losing money at the till when shopping on everyday items.
Trading standards have stated that they fear customers may be paying too much for their food shop, as products could be getting mislabelled before they hit shelves, reports The Sun. Shoppers could be overpaying for something as small as a product being labelled as having the wrong weight.
Trading Standards Scotland have now put out a call to retailers and packers to ensure customers are getting exactly what they pay for. This news comes as the cost of everyday food items increases sharply as the inflation rate soars.
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Trading standards officers carried out weight checks on packaged goods at a variety of different retail outlets in the west of Scotland - 39 stores in total. Products were marked as short-weight on 17 of these visits.
One packer, that has a contract signed to supply half-a-million supermarket ready meals weekly, was found to have produced meals with deficiencies of as much as 14 per cent - a loss of 26 pence per pack. Trading Standards Scotland has said that if the same level of deficiency was shown across the entire production, then losses to customers could reach as high as £130,000 weekly, or £6.76 million a year.
296 different product lines were checked in total, with 24 (8 per cent) found to contain short-weight packs. David MacKenzie, Chair of Society of Chief Officers of Trading and Standards in Scotland (SCOTSS) has said that short-weight products could be contributing to the cost of living crisis the UK is in right now.
David said: "Measurement is at the heart of fair trade in goods, making sure that consumers get what they pay for and that businesses are weighing and measuring goods accurately.
"With the current cost-of-living crisis, it is even more important that the processes and systems that should be in place are working properly and consumers get what they pay for."
Food bills have risen by 11.6 per cent, an annual increase of £533 for the average UK household. This means that families will fork out at least ten pounds more a week if they buy the same products as they did in 2021, according to research firm Kantar.
Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, said: "Where there are concerns, retailers will work with their suppliers, packers, and all relevant authorities, to ensure products meet customer expectations.”
According to the official rule of Packaged Goods Regulations 2006, the average batch must be at or above the weight or volume indicated on the packaging. Products may be packed so they contain at least the quantity displayed on a label.
Packages can contain more information than the quantity, but not any less. They can also be packed to an average measurement that is on the label.
However, every packer must follow these rules:
- the contents of the packages must not be less, on average, than the weight on the label
- only a small number can fall below a certain margin of error, known as the ‘tolerable negative error’ (TNE)
- no package can be underweight by more than twice the TNE
Products should never be twice the TNE short. If so, this is considered an offence.
For more information on this, visit the Trading Standards Scotland website here.
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