Form UE-1 · Register of permitted wrongness
Every official number is a range with a name on it.
A jar says 454 g. A regulator says what “454 g” is allowed to mean. Someone argued over where that edge goes, and the edge is where the rule shows what it really protects. This site takes one tolerance at a time and works it through.
A tolerance is a decision about whose mistakes to forgive. Read one closely and you can tell who wrote it.
Each entry gives the nominal value, what the rule allows, and the document that allows it. Entries marked worked have a page where you can set the variables and run the inspection yourself.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you enter leaves it.
| Item | Nominal | Allowed | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short fill worked A packaged food labeled by weight, US |
454 g | Any one package up to 19.9 g short. The sample’s average may also fall short, by up to 0.635 × the sample’s standard deviation, and the lot still passes. | NIST Handbook 133 (2025), App. A, Tables 2-1 and 2-5 1 |
| Insects in peanut butter US |
0 fragments | FDA action begins at an average of 30 or more insect fragments, or 1 or more rodent hairs, per 100 g. The handbook gives the significance of both defects as “aesthetic”. | FDA Food Defect Levels Handbook 2 |
| Insects in chocolate US |
0 fragments | Action at an average of 60 or more insect fragments per 100 g across six 100-gram subsamples, or 90 or more in any one subsample. | FDA Food Defect Levels Handbook 2 |
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST Handbook 133: Checking the Net Contents of Packaged Goods, 2025 edition. Appendix A, Table 2-1 (Sampling Plans for Category A) and Table 2-5 (Maximum Allowable Variations for Packages Labeled by Weight). A US government work.
- US Food and Drug Administration, Food Defect Levels Handbook, entries for peanut butter and for chocolate and chocolate liquor. The handbook says the levels “pose no inherent hazard to health.”