I usually find a bunch of shelless ones in the bottom of the bag.
Comment on Costco Pistachios
Snapz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Never realized the incentives these ghouls have to add empty shells to the mix to bulk the bag… Diabolical. If it isn’t intentional, venture capital is watching and it’s certainly now their next rock to squeeze blood from.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 day ago
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
So… consider that if they scoop them one bag at a time from a large container nobody is adding extra shells, some of the nuts fall to the bottom of the container.
That means some bags at the end of each batch will be lucky and others (like this one) won’t. The math is probably something along the lines of “how can I optimize the cooking and prep process to keep at least XXX percent of nuts in the shells?” and not “How can I guarantee each bag has statistically equal nuts and shells” or “Mwahahaha how can I source empty shells to fill 20% of all bags!”
Snapz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You are seriously underestimating the industrial factory technology at scale to do quality control when processing food. If they wanted, they could literally remove individual ants from the flow of 5 ton sacks of coffee beans, in a sustainable way. They literally have lasers and sensors to find undesirable product and knock it out of high speed belt flows of fruits and vegetables with micro targeted jets of air and things like that.
You’re mistake is is that you are thinking of how YOU would sort these yourself, that’s part of our problem as humans, we have a bit of a narcissistic bias. Similar to trump people that think, " he’s doing well enough… I’d do a but better probably, but he’s doing okay" they are comparing to themselves as baseline, when they aren’t even near qualified either.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
While that is true that factories CAN be extremely detailed in their process, everything is driven by cost efficiency. If it is more efficient to process a large batch instead of a small one, what happens in this thread is what you get. There is no reason to say “oh they could remove those shells!” because it’s only a thing worth doing of it’s cost effective.
So I guess yes you’re right it’s fixable but only if it’s a problem people care about. I think it’s fundamentally crazier to think you can figure what is profitable for pistachios from a thread by some rando better than the company that makes them.
Maybe it’s a conspiracy, probably it’s process optimization.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I’m all for a good conspiracy theory, but I can practically guarantee you that no one is inspecting every singe nut looking for empty shells to bulk up the bag.
Other than a certain amount of each batch that is kept aside for quality control testing, the bags are filled by machines on a conveyor belt. I doubt a human even looks at them until they’re at the final stage and ready for the last quality control test.
It’s completely random how many empties there will be in a bag. OP was just unlucky this time.
tetris11@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Also, the unshelled nuts might still be in the bag. Shit shakes loose, ya know
Snapz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
See my other response, it’s very much not random. Every processed product in the modern world is hyper optimized for profit. At the least , they know the average weight of shell with nut and without in grams or something smaller. Also likely a hopper with high speed cameras to count yield per bag to maintain exact profit margins. There could be, and likely is, a scale at the end of line that weighs and would five a fairly faithful estimate of empty percentage per bag. And all that is automated.
Problem is that infrastructure likely exists more or less and they have just turned up the acceptable percentage of empties probably. Like anything else, VC pushes those lines quarter after quarter until people might revolt (or in another time, an administration regulates an acceptable amount of “defective” product).
wieson@feddit.org 1 day ago
They don’t need to. If they passed the nuts over a shaky conveyor to collect those tasty expensive deshelled nuts, they’d have bulking shells for free.