Why our cans are often only partially filled!

Dear customers,

today we received another enquiry about why the tins or jars are not full. In this case, a jar of Zinc from Natur Vital was only a quarter full.

At first glance that looks like misleading packaging, and of course we understand that customers initially get that impression. So that we don’t have to answer the same question in a time-consuming way over and over, here is a new blog post that should answer all outstanding questions. 
For the sake of simplicity I won’t rewrite everything I once again prepared for the customer at great time expense; I’ll simply copy it in here!

Hello Mr X,

I can understand that it looks like a waste of material. But before making further statements such as "misleading packaging" or "untrustworthy" one should have a bit more specialist knowledge before making such accusations...

1. The Food Information Regulation (LMIV) requires that a lot of information has to appear on the jars, and that in a font size of at least 0.9–1.2 mm height.
   On a tin that is too small this isn’t possible; if you tried to do it anyway you’d have to use tiny print and you’d either quickly have the food inspection authority on your back — they inspect our warehouse once a year — or a legal warning from a competitor. That’s this sick law from the Nazi era, by which lawyers today are allowed to make a killing, and which exists only in Germany and Austria.
2. Even that size is an imposition for seniors or anyone over 50, which is why I find it justified — in fact it should really be larger. One of our goals as a shop is to be senior-friendly. Quite apart from handling the tins. I’m sure all our customers over 70, and we have very many of them, would agree that a mini tin with a mini lid would simply no longer be manageable at that age with poor eyesight and shaky hands. It already annoys me a great deal when the doctor prescribes tiny pills that I then have to fumble out of mini tins, and I’m only just over 50.
3. The manufacturers buy the tins or jars in very large quantities. If, for their 80 products, they buy, say, 10 different tin sizes and order 10,000 of each size, they pay much less per tin than if they had 80 different tins so that each would be optimally matched to the fill level and they would only buy 1,250 of each. I don’t think many customers would be willing to pay €25 instead of €23.50 for the zinc, just because the jars bought in such small quantities would simply be insanely expensive.
4. Natur Vital makes a huge effort to produce products with as few additives as possible. It would be no problem to stuff a bit more cellulose powder into a capsule or a bit more heavy magnesium oxide so that it looks like there’s a lot in there and the price per 100 g falls, even though there is hardly anything valuable inside. Many manufacturers are happy to do that; Natur Vital deliberately doesn’t, nor does any other brand in our shop.

I also consider it fraudulent when a huge bag of muesli is only two-thirds full, because that is clearly no longer due to the label not fitting or the smaller bags being more expensive. That is clearly cheating the customer. But in the case you mentioned, certainly not.
I hope this answers the question.

Kind regards

Mario Müller