Supermarket pre-packaged cheese! Any supermarket, any best value cheese! This isn’t about one store, or another, just an observation. It’s just a small thing, but can really lift your spirits a little bit if you’re buying your budget cheese at the supermarket and wondering how far it’ll go. You might’ve done your research to find the best value cheese before you went shopping; you know your prices, you know your £/Kg, you know what’s what. But there’s one small final trick to enjoy!

Blocks of cheese, sold pre-packed and sealed, stacked in a box, all at the same price, actually varies in weight. The packs don’t all weigh the same! You’d think that if a pack were labelled as a weight, then that’s the weight of the contents – but that’s often not the case. There is a variance, sometimes as much as 10%, between packages. The factories can’t cut the cheese absolutely, to the exact gram, most of the time – they work on an average weight.

A block of cheese is part of the average of the box, of the batch. This means individual pack weights can vary by up to 10%. Two packs won’t weigh the same. They’re roughly the same, but some are a tiny bit heavier than others! Who’d have thought it.

Weigh the Cheese Packs by Hand

When I buy pre-packaged cheese in a block I’ll always pick up 2-3 packs and compare the weight between the cheese packs, by hand, to try to guess if one’s a smidge heavier than another. I’ll trust my instinct and weigh up two packs at a time, to try to feel and guess which one’s heavier, if any. If they both feel the same, I might see if I can quickly spot a 3rd to try. I won’t go further than that – try a maximum of three, that’s enough. Else you’re just “being daft” 🙂

Whether I choose right or not is irrelevant – but I do feel I picked up the heaviest one when I make my choice and pop it in the basket. I feel like a got a bargain, got the best deal, found the best value.

I’ve had a few instances where the difference is noticeable, more often there’s little difference – but every gram counts!

Today’s Cheese Weight

This particular pack was bought recently – although I did the “test for weight” between two packs at the time I didn’t feel there was any pack that was noticeably different. This pack was typical in the box I thought. So how much DID it weigh?

I would say, I’d not normally weigh my cheese, to check if I got a free 1g in the pack 🙂 But, just for today, I did. This is a 750g block of cheese – and, as you can see, I got free cheese! There’s an extra 10g. Of course, you could say “that’s the bag”, who knows… I’m not going to take it out and weigh it to “prove a point” that doesn’t need to be made or won 🙂

Small Amusement!

It’s a small amusement…. a small “win” … but if you try this for yourself it’ll warm the cockles of your heart when you think you’ve picked a winner!

Which Shops Have the Most Variance?

I’ve never made a scientific study of the weight of cheese, but I do feel that smaller packs, typically 400 gram packs of cheddar, sold at the “budget supermarkets” tend to have the widest variance from the weight on the pack.

While you’re at it – why not consider other, similar, products typically bagged up at the same printed weight…. win a little extra on the variance.

P.S. I know I need to get a proper hobby! But this is a free hobby 🙂