How much added water is allowed in a chicken without it being declared on the label?

Grumpy_chap

HillStreetBlues said:

Grumpy_chap said:

DullGreyGuy said:

wild666 said:

What I find is that a lot of products have a E on the labelling meaning that the product can weigh less than what is quoted on the label. Frozen meat can have a lot of water added that isn't mentioned on the label, especially bacon that says it's 200g but if you take the contents out of the packaging and weigh them it will say 150g. The letter E is used so that manufacturers can put less contents in the packet and still be within the law. 
I buy a 900g block of cheese from Lidl every few weeks and it's normally over 900g but only by 4 or 5g. Fish is another thing I buy and it says 500g on the box but the last box I bought the four fillets weighed 440g, 60g less than the weight stated on the box.

Packaging is allowed to have one of two methods...

1) Guaranteed minimum weight
2) Average weight

An E on the package means they've gone for option 2. With this option there is an allowable deviation both in frequency and weight/volume based on the declared average weight along with a minimum sampling set of rules. One of the additional rules is that no package can be double the tolerable negative error even if the average of the sample would otherwise have still been ok. Your block of cheese certainly would have failed the batch had it been sampled for testing. 

Why would the cheese fail?

OP says 900g block (sold weight) was 904g or 905g actual weight.  Seems good to me.

I think something fishy went on.

That was a bit cheesy