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The story
A bakery in Pfaffenhofen, Bavaria, was reported to authorities by a customer after a half-loaf of bread turned out to be 10 grams under the standard weight — and ended up spending €15,000 to equip itself with certified scales, a story that’s been making the rounds in the German-speaking Lemmy community. Under Germany’s Weights and Measures Act (Mess- und Eichgesetz), businesses selling goods like bread by weight are required to use scales that pass regular official certification. The thread split between those calling the customer’s complaint over a mere 10 grams “excessive” and those arguing the regulation exists to stop fraud across the whole food industry, with the discussion spiraling into debates over what a fair price for a scale actually is and what bakeries should do about it.
Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, Bavaria: the story of how half a loaf of bread cost a bakery €15,000
> In Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, a customer felt they’d been “robbed” of 10 grams of bread and reported it to the authorities. For the baker who owns the shop, that tiny discrepancy came at a steep price.
I went back and forth on whether to tweak the headline to fit the new house rules, but decided to leave it as is — the full nuance is too much to fit in a headline anyway, and even though this one reads a little clickbait-y, it does capture what actually happened.
Source: spiegel.de / original article here
What people said
Still way too expensive for a bakery though. I use a certified Kern scale in the lab, and a basic certified food scale (1g increments, up to 6000g max) runs about €350.
https://www.kern-sohn.com/shop/de/produkte/industriewaagen/food/ffn-6k1ipn/
Then again, you can always spend as much as you want on anything.
The owner has six branches. So that's €2,500 per certified professional-grade scale.
Maybe if several staff are working the register at once, you need more than one scale per shop? And certification probably has to be renewed periodically too, so that cost might be baked into the price.
Isn't that just… reasonable? That's how deli counters sell sausage and cheese too. I don't see the problem.
I don't know, just going off common sense here, but I'd think any bakery needs certified scales — same as a greengrocer. Every bakery I know weighs even a half-loaf before selling it.
It is a small difference, sure. But why don't bakeries just bake a little heavier to build in a margin? Like baking a 1kg loaf as 1.05kg?
Simple — because that eats into ingredient costs. So they cut it as close as possible, and that's also why they don't buy the certified scales that have been mandatory for six years now.
10 grams off of 250g or 500g seems pretty negligible to me. And the next customer ends up getting 10 grams extra anyway. Having to drop €15,000 on scales over that is kind of absurd.
Sounds absurd, but it's probably the rational move. Same town means there's a decent chance of running into the same customer again.
Or they could just bake a few smaller whole loaves instead and sell those?
I've never run into anything like that. At the bakery I go to, there's no posted weight for the bread anywhere, so I don't think you could even complain that a half-loaf was too light.
Something about this story doesn't quite sit right with me either. In my experience, bakeries always weigh a half-loaf before selling it.
You should take a closer look next time. Bread is usually displayed with a little sign behind the case, like 'Kudolfer Farmhouse Bread, €4.90/750g.' If a place does it differently, that would be a pretty unusual exception for a bakery to get away with.
This 'small neighborhood bakery' had 66 employees as of 2021. So it's actually a chain spread across multiple towns. At that scale, properly weighing what you sell is a reasonable expectation. The scale's probably hooked up to the POS system too, not some household kitchen scale.
Well yeah, if the bakery had just said 'ugh, the scale cost us €2,500 😭,' nobody would've bothered writing an article about it.
Actually curious now — how many branches did the nitpicky customer have?
Maybe that bakery actually has even more branches than reported, and it's not really a 'small neighborhood bakery' at all but a full-on chain.
Good idea! Though it does sound almost like a loophole…
Background and Key Points of This Story
Germany’s Weights and Measures Act (Mess- und Eichgesetz) requires businesses that sell goods like bread by weight to have their scales regularly certified. The system exists to prevent businesses from shortchanging customers through eyeballed measurements, and the key point in this case is that what should have been a trivial 10-gram shortfall on a half-loaf got treated as a legal matter over inadequate certification. The thread split between those who saw the 10-gram discrepancy as too small to justify the customer reporting it — calling that reaction “excessive” — and those who focused on the shop’s failure to keep its scales properly certified as a management shortfall. Also notable: while reports describe it as a “small neighborhood bakery,” commenters pointed out that as of 2021 it had 66 employees and multiple branches, making it a chain — a detail that reframes the story away from a simple “small shop vs. bureaucracy” narrative.
*This article is a Japanese paraphrase/summary, produced by our editorial team, of the Lemmy c/dach thread “Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm: Wie ein halbes Brot eine Bäckerei aus Bayern 15.000 Euro kostete.” Responsibility for the translated content rests with this site.
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