We weighed 100 bags of Lay’s chips — This is how many were underweight

MyBroadband purchased and weighed 100 bags of Lay’s 36-gram chips and found that three units were underweight by 1–2 grams.

The test follows a recent incident where MyBroadband purchased a single bag of Lay’s 36-gram chips and discovered it weighed only 25 grams.

Pepsico — the owner of Simba, of which Lay’s is a sub-brand — told MyBroadband that finding a 25-gram bag “was not a common occurrence at all”.

The company stated MyBroadband’s bag of chips was produced on 12 November 2022 at its Isando plant.

“It is one of 72,576 packs produced on that day of 36g Lay’s Portuguese Peri-Peri prawn flavour. This is the only query we have received related to a suspected underweight pack,” said Pepsico.

It added it has strict controls in place to ensure its products are always up to standard.

Testing 100 bags of Lay’s

To test this claim, MyBroadband bought 100 bags of Lay’s 36-gram chips.

To ensure a good spread for the test, the following was put in place:

• The chips were purchased in batches from Checkers, Pick n Pay, Spar, and Clicks over two days.
• Multiple flavours were purchased.
• No hand-weighing or “pre-checks” were conducted on the chips — we simply put multiple bags into our shopping basket and paid.

We then took the 100 bags of chips to our office and weighed each of them using a kitchen scale that is accurate to within one gram.

Of the 100 bags, 97 were either at the stated weight of 36 grams or above it. Three packs — or 3% of the test batch — were underweight by 1–2 grams.

It should be noted that several packs were overweight by 4 grams or more.

The test substantiates Pepsico’s statement that our 25-gram bag of Lay’s chips was a rare occurrence.

Photos of underweight bags

Photos of the three underweight bags are shown below.

Table of results

The table below details the findings of the test.

Pepsico comment

MyBroadband contacted Pepsico for comment, and the company reiterated that it has strict controls to ensure it meets the required standards within its snack production facilities.

“In this case, it is SANS 458 of 2011 that applies, specifically: Tolerances permitted for the accuracy of measurements of products (including pre-packaged products) in terms of legal metrology legislation,” a Pepsico spokesperson said.

The company explained that several processes are standard on its production line, including:

• A quality team that conducts hourly checks on a random selection of 10 packs off the line to ensure weight consistency.
• Scales are calibrated bi-annually by an external laboratory to ensure accuracy.
• Case checkers inspect random cases hourly for the total weight of the case.
• Every four hours, there is a quality ‘wall’ run that checks the processing quality (flavour, breakage of each chip etc.) and the packaging quality (seals on packs, weight, barcodes, etc.).
• The senior quality team conducts random checks throughout each shift to verify each of the above checks.
• There is a full verification run each time there is a flavour change on the production line.

Pepsico said it monitors against the tolerances specified by SANS 458.

Now read: We tried all four PRIME drink flavours Checkers sells

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We weighed 100 bags of Lay’s chips — This is how many were underweight