Case on the record
The label says 16 oz. The scale stopped at 13.4.
Great Value bacon: 16 oz labeled, 13.4 oz actual. Is that legal?
He pulls the package out of the fridge, sets it on the scale, and waits for the number to settle. The label on the front says 16 oz. TikTok creator @james_wrigg ("Jimmy Wrigg") ran that exact test on Walmart's Great Value bacon, and the display read 13.4 oz. He tried a second package. 14 oz. Commenters piled into the replies describing the same gap on their own kitchen scales.
Great Value bacon, 16 oz package
Labeled
16 oz
Actual
13.4 oz
Short by
2.6 oz
Legal Limit
1 oz
Short by 2.600 oz, which exceeds the legal tolerance of 1 oz for this quantity.
This is computed against NIST Handbook 133, Table 2-9 (the USDA meat/poultry tolerance table), the same public standard every state weights & measures agency uses. See how we source this data.
Weight isn't the same on every package in a batch: some variance is normal and legal, and other shoppers who weighed their own Great Value bacon reported packages at 18.2 oz and 17.98 oz, over the labeled weight. NIST's rule (above) is built around exactly that reality: it sets a maximum allowable shortfall, not a zero-tolerance rule, and USDA/NIST expect an average across a production lot to meet the label. Bacon is USDA-inspected meat, so the USDA table applies: for a package labeled between 7 oz and 3 lb, the allowed shortfall is 1 oz. Inspectors test a sample from a batch, and the batch fails if its average comes up short or more than a small number of packages go past that 1 oz. A single short package is evidence worth checking with your own scale, but not, by itself, proof of a systemic problem.
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