The Thief

I have a friend that owns a bakery. This is not your neighborhood bakery but an industrial bakery that makes cookies for one of the major theme parks in both Los Angeles and Orlando. His facility in Orlando has generated profits since the day it opened, however that is not the case for his Southern California plant. The plants are almost exactly the same, except the California Facility is bigger. The California facility has never generated positive revenue and is being supported by the Florida plant. In fact, last year the California plant lost $1 million dollars. I was blown away by this, and offered to help him find the problem. After a four hour plant inspection/investigation I helped him identify the problem. He had a thief working for him.
The thief wasn’t stealing money, but product. My friend had run production numbers against inventory and stock usage and found that he was bleeding almost 16% of his inventory. He had examined the production records and couldn’t find any discrepancy in units made versus units shipped. His examination of spoilage records found no problems. The problem had to be in the raw ingredients. Was somebody paying kickbacks to a supplier? Was an employee selling materials out the back door?

I found the thief within the first hour of my inspection.

The thief was giving away the ingredients and my friend could not fire him. He couldn’t call the police and have him arrested. He couldn’t even sue the thief and recover any of the stolen money. It was all gone, unrecoverable. Why couldn’t he fire him? Was he a family member or trusted friend? No, my friend couldn’t do anything because the thief was his very own processes.


While performing my inspection I noticed that my friend was checking the weight of every cookie that was made. His customer would not accept cookies that were under weight. As part of my friends quality checks he had purchased a scale that would weigh each cookie as it came off the packing line and reject any cookie that didn’t weigh enough. This type of scale is called an in motion check weigher, and can be set to reject a product that weighs too much or too little. As I watched the machine run, I noticed that all of the cookies were over weight. Not just a small amount, but quite a bit. On a four ounce cookie they were averaging more than a half an ounce over weight per cookie. Soooo, he was giving away over half an ounce per cookie!

Lets get into some detail. His bakery manufactures 7000 cookies a day by hand, and sells them for $4.99 each. When you visit the amusement park you pay $8.99 for one of his cookies. His plant runs five days a week fifty-two weeks a year with twenty days of vacation and holidays, so 240 days a year. His gross revenue on this one product is over $8.3 million a year. Now looking at his production numbers, he was charging $1.25 per ounce. The amount he was actually giving away was $0.79 per cookie. This doesn’t seem like much but he was giving away over $5,500 in potential revenue per day or about $110,000 a month.


He and his production team were so worried about losing their marquee customer that they had made sure that they never sent them an underweight cookie. Just to be sure that it wasn’t underweight, they were making their cookies just a little heavy. Being overcautious had cost my friend $1.3 million dollars in potential revenues. This is of course potential revenue, and doesn’t count production and material costs, but this revenue is gone. The cost of the materials was much less than the selling price of the final product, but adding a level of profit to the ingredients would have generated some amount of gross profit that would have offset his loss to some degree or another.

Many companies look at the services performed by their vendors as pure expense with no way to recover any revenue. This is an erroneous way to look at the relationship. My company Left Coast Scales, services and calibrates weighing equipment. When we find a scale that is out of calibration, we can’t tell how long it has been that way. We can set a limit to the amount of time it was off by looking at the last time we serviced it. The calibration interval is often set by regulatory or customer requirements. But are these intervals good enough for your company? Sometimes they are, but like my friend just having a scale is not enough. It has to be correct. To calculate the daily loss of revenue that can be caused by your scale, use the following formula.

E x N x C = Loss

where E=the amount your scale is off, N=the number of weighments you perform each day, and C=the cost of the ingredient being weighed.

To get the yearly loss multiply the daily loss by the number of work days your company has in a year.
I will give two examples to demonstrate the losses that can occur.

Example 1:
Customer 1 is a recycler and has a truck scale that is off 20 pounds. They purchase scrap steal at $200 per ton or $0.10 per pound. They weigh 10 trucks a day. They work 240 days a year. The state of California requires that the scale be checked once a year.

20 x 10 x $0.10 = $20 per day or $4800 a year

Example 2:
Customer 2 is a cosmetic company and uses a balance to weigh fragrances. The scale is off 0.1 grams. They use a fragrance that they purchase for $2 a gram and weigh out the product 100 times a day for their batching line. They work 220 days a year, and the FDA requires that the scales be checked twice a year.

0.1 x 100 x $2 = $20 a day or $2200 every six months.


My friend had put his company into the position of losing money by justifying to himself that it was better to give away a little product than to lose a customer. Many companies put themselves in this position by not weighing the cost of an inaccurate scale as compared to the cost of regular maintenance. They look at the cost of having a company come out and check their weighing devices and make a decision based on an immediate perception that the service is too expensive. In example #1 the typical scale service on a truck scale is going to be less than a $500 an inspection (depending on where you are located), and the usual error found while performing an inspection is much greater than 20 pounds (when an error is found). In example #2 there are usually many more scales than just the one weighing fragrances, but if that is the only scale being checked the price should be less than $200, and adding extra scales becomes a factor of either time, or price based on the number of devices. Time is based on how long does it take to calibrate all of the scales. My company usually calibrates 4 scales an hour and typical pricing is based on $70 to $140 per hour. Device pricing can vary from $25 a scale to $150 a scale depending on complexity and the company performing the service. Most of the time there is also a travel and equipment charge to get to the site.

When deciding to have your scales calibrated the cost of the inspection and calibration is an important factor, but it should be weighed against the cost of having an inaccurate scale that is stealing money from your business as well as regulatory and customer requirements.
When my friend realized the magnitude of the mistake he was making with his process he had me adjust his check weigher to reject product that weighed too much as well as too little, and sound an alarm when it did. The immediate feedback to his production people helped them with their portions and helped him to bring his production under tighter control.

How Do You Define Quality?

Having been in the scale industry for the last 27 years, I have recommended many different scales and systems for my customers. For many years I would help customers spec their needs as part of the service that my company provided. In order to quote the correct product, I often had to dig deep into the weeds to determine what the customer really needed even when they didn’t know themselves.

I had a food manufacturer ask me to quote him some scales for checking the pre-packaged weight of his product. After a site visit, and talking to production and Quality Control, I made several determinations:

  • The maximum product weight was 1.5kg and minimum was 500g.
  • The minimum required tolerance was +/- 0.5g.
  • The scales needed to be easy to clean.
  • The scales were subject to intermittent water spray.
  • The customer wasn’t connected to a data collection system, but wanted the ability to connect at a later date.

I quoted a 3kg wash down, stainless steel bench scale that read by 0.1g. After presenting the quote, I was contacted by the customer and told that my quoted price was too high. The purchasing manager had found the same scales on-line, for a third of the price I had quoted, and purchased them. I asked the purchasing manager where he was getting them from since he was paying 40% less than my cost for them. He wouldn’t tell me but he did have me install them.

Guess what? They weren’t the same scales I had quoted. The only thing that matched was the capacity and resolution. I had quoted an entire stainless scale and these were plastic with a small stainless pan. They weren’t water proof or even water resistant and they couldn’t connect to a data collection system.

This customer purchased eight scales, and by the end of the year had replaced all of them at least once and several twice. Water damage wasn’t covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

At the beginning of the new fiscal year the Quality Control Department installed the new data collection software. All eight scales had to be replaced with the scales I had quoted originally.

I had quoted quality scales that matched the customer’s needs. After a year in use the customer was convinced that the scales they had purchased were junk. Honestly there was nothing wrong with the quality of the scales purchased. They had just purchased scales that didn’t meet their needs.

Quality can be a low cost import, but it has to meet your needs and requirements. If you don’t know what you need, and you bring in an expert to help define your needs and requirements, trust the expert. If you aren’t sure that the expert is correct, question them, and determine how and where they got their data. Most scale companies won’t charge you for this expert advice, but they do expect to have a strong chance of getting the order.

Quality also comes in the after sale service. If I had quoted the wrong scale in the example above and sold the customer the same scale they purchased. I would have honored the implied warranty. Not every scale company will do this, so know whom you are purchasing from.

​Quality in a product is determined by you. Having your needs and expectations met on a product is dependent on the definition of your needs. Without a true definition of your expectations you will not be satisfied with what you are purchasing.

Booting Your Hopper

I was recently called out to a customers because their hopper scale kept filling after the filling auger was turned off. I performed a thorough inspection and couldn’t find anything mechanically wrong with the scale. I had the customer run through the batching process so that I could observe the problem from the customer’s perspective. I watched the indicator slowly fill the hopper and after the filling equipment turned off, the scale slowly and erratically added an additional 200 to 300 pounds to the batch. I then went out and watched the batching equipment fill the hopper.  As I watched, I saw the boot on the left slowly start to suck in until it was displacing only half the volume it had when the batch started.  Somehow or another the boot was being put under vacuum and the boot was pulling on the scale. When the batch was done the boot slowly relaxed and returned to normal. With the customer’s consent I put a pipe into the top of the boot to relieve the vacuum. We ran another batch and the problem went away. I told the customer to figure out where the vacuum was coming from and fix it, but the problem was fixed for now.  Rubber boots can cause some weird and perplexing problems.


If you have a tank or hopper that is being filled with powder or something similar, you have seen boots. Boots can be made of many different materials from cotton fabric to silicone rubber. They often are the culprit in weighing issues on hoppers and tanks that had been working fine and all of a sudden aren’t.  They are used when you have materials that need to be transferred into a hopper or tank but the material will cause a lot of dust or want to flow out of the filling aperture.  Since hard piping to a scale is a no-no, boots were created to allow the scale to move freely but still confine the material being transferred.

All of the issues that will occur with boots come down to some kind of bind. Here are some of the problems that you will see:
1.     Material builds up inside of the boot and bridges across the gap between the fill pipe and the pipe on the hopper.
2.     The boot is installed without any give, or too tightly.
3.     Material works its way between the receiving pipe and the boot.
4.     The material sticks to the boot and hardens.
5.     The boot stretches like a rubber band as the hopper fills and moves.
These issues all prevent the hopper from moving freely.  Without free movement the scale will often not zero correctly or weigh non-linearly.  

These problems can be very difficult to find and diagnose. A full inspection on tanks and hoppers is not complete without examining the boots and piping. When problems are found it is always best to have your customer clean, repair, or replace suspect piping and/or boots to prevent problems from developing.

Examples of Impacted Boots on Various Hopper Scales