Be Excellent To Each Other

What is that massive e character next to ml on stuff like toothpaste? Always puzzled me!

I was always told it meant 'in each unit'.

This 'e'?

It's the symbol for 'estimated'. As it is a symbol rather than a sign it always appears in the same font, which is why it sometimes looks 'out of place' next to the product font.

It means "net", as in the "after deduction" meaning of the word. It's telling you there is 100ml of toothpaste after packaging volume is subtracted. You see the same thing on most packaged food, which you can easily confirm next time you open a can of beans. Weigh the whole thing, then weigh the empty can - the difference will be the X GRAMS E label on the side, i.e. The weight of the contents.

It actually means 'estimated'. That the net weight/volume etc of the contents are estimated to be around the number printed in the label but within EU guidelines for the tolerable limits (for yarn I believe this is +/- 5% either way), other goods have other tolerable limits. The symbol itself means estimated, though. I believe I have provided links to this effect.

I think the symbol mean explosive.

I have never bought explosives, but if they are sold by weight, volume, etc than the amount may well be sold within estimated tolerable limits in the EU.

Has Mimi just Out-facted Gaywood?

I can't cope.

Obviously the smarties and Guinness told her last night...

Malc

Malc, remember I said the answer was a deer? Here it is:

That's a Stag

Malc

I know.

Though, it is a stag as well as a deer, not instead of a dear, much as Daniel Craig is man as well as a human being, not instead of one.

stag |stag|
noun
1 a male deer.

It's also a mammal and an animal and a life form too

Malc

's Superb!

Malc

Heh. Teach me to post without reading or googling!

I think in practice the estimations aren't estimations any more. I'm in the US so can't check - someone go look at a can of beans. I think the weight will show as "395g e" which is a very accurate estimate!

I win.

The internet has now served its function and will now begin to shut down.

Thanks for taking part.

I thought it was quite well thought out and coherent, considering I had imbibed a whole glass of Guinness by that point

It's an estimate in as much as they're covering their arses. They plonk the same amount of beans in every tin, but there's bound to be a discrepancy between different cans of a couple of grams here or there, so the 'e' covers that.

My understanding is that when they say "average X contents" there's a legal standard for how many boxes must have 100 or over - I think it's the mean minus two standard deviations. The weight is probably a lot more accurate these days though, with modern industrial processes - I bet it hardly differs at all. I'll weigh the contents of the next few tins of beans I eat.

You are beyond rescue.

At my work when a container is being filled it is controlled by a few different ways including the machine settings, camera checks to compare the height of the fill, sight checks, quality control checks and finally once a case has been made each one is weighed and any deviation by more than about +/-10g is automatically rejected from the line.

I motion to have this threat stickied as a milestone in history.

Also, I'm so glad someone asked this, because I'd always wondered as well.

What do you fill, Gill? I am now curious to discover what you make For some random reason I thought you drove a bus!

Whisky! I'm doing an apprenticeship, training to become a kalmar.


Maybe it's because up until this year my main chat on twitter was moaning about bus journeys?

Hehe, I really don't know where I got that notion from! Whisky sounds like far more fun, though

I maybe shouldn't tell you this since I might make you jealous but...I work for the company that owns Guinness...

What? I don't get it. School me up.

Dimrill is perhaps suggesting that more trivial questions that might not prompt much discussion but still bring forth answers might be posted in the Bits & Bobs thread of general chatter.

but there's loads of 'em, I'd guess approx 21????????? Which is the one for unknown packaging meanings????

The one with fewer than 100 pages.

The one that isn't locked (also known as the only one that you can post in)

ouch............

Be fair. I've only been here a bloody week or summot. How'm I supposed to know this?

Flipping heck.

Lurk and learn

You've been here a week and that's the worst thing that somebody has said to you? You've been let off lightly.

Really, that wasn't nasty, it's just the case that there's only one that is unlocked, and as such there's only one you can post it. Bits and Bobs is all at once the most interesting and least interesting thread of the board.

Smart. I need that in my life.

It's a good thread to just dip into if you're busy and don't want to get caught up in a long discussion that might distract you, I guess, plus it's always interesting to see how many people on the board Zio has made pregnant in any given week. Unless you want to be made pregnant, avoid Zio.

Or Craster if you happen to be a badger.

I'm fairly sure I've never crossbred.

I don't have many boundaries in this life but one I have never crossed is to go zoo'ing without slapping a bit of clingfilm over my tallywhacker.

I disagree with this. I never read Bits 'n' Bobs so therefore my VALUABLE INPUT would not be RECIEVAITED by your good selves.

I like that you managed to just self-belm your own quoting failure.

I don't even know how that happened. Actually, I do now. I just started typing in all that whitespace..

It is the forum equivalent of comic timing, young Pod.

Beware of Bits Und Bobs. It can suck you in like a sucking thing with suckers (quiet at the back, there). I think I posted something absurd like 100 times in one B&B last year when work was quiet.

Not quite. Or at all, actually.

The ‘e’ mark constitutes a guarantee by the importer that a product to which it is applied has been filled in accordance with EU average fill requirements. It's used as a passport throughout the European Community to prevent your products getting checked by customs and whatnot.

There are restrictions on its use and in most cases companies who intend to export ‘e’ marked goods must notify their local weights and measures authority.

The average fill system requires that the contents of products must be an average amount which is not less than the amount marked on the label
(known as the nominal quantity). Not more than one package in [some amount or other] may contain less that the nominal quantity by more than an amount called the "Tolerable Negative Error", and no products may contain less that the nominal quantity by more than twice the TNE.

I unfortunately know this due to my time as a lawyer at Evil Multinational Cosmetics Company, during which one of the many things I was responsible for was checking packaging designs for legal compliance.

Ooooh - a challenger appears!