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Spices and seasoning
All Containers›Shop by use case›Spices and seasoning›The spice itself›Bulk density, and the half empty jarShop all spices and seasoning →
The spice

Bulk density, and the half empty jar

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

You will fill a jar correctly, to the exact net weight on the label, and a customer will tell you it arrived half empty. They are not wrong about what they saw and you are not wrong about what you put in.

The complaint you will get

Dried leaf is mostly air. A jar holding an accurate net weight of oregano looks dramatically underfilled next to the same jar holding the same net weight of salt, because the two materials differ in bulk density by a large multiple.

The complaint is always about the leafy ones, and it is always framed as short measure.

Why weight and volume diverge

You sell by weight, because that is what the declaration requires. You buy a container by volume, because that is how containers are specified. Nothing reconciles those two except the bulk density of the specific material, which varies by spice, by grind, and even by how the jar was filled and settled.

A finer grind packs denser. A jar that has traveled settles. The same weight occupies noticeably less space at the end of a truck journey than it did on your bench, which is why the customer's jar looks emptier than yours did.

The headspace has a name in regulation. Slack-fill is the difference between a container's actual capacity and the volume of product in it, and where a container does not let the consumer see the contents, nonfunctional slack-fill makes the package misleading.

Functional slack-fill is allowed, and it explicitly covers unavoidable settling and the practical inability to reduce package size further. Both apply to spice. But the defense is that the headspace performs a function, not that the weight was right.

Choosing the jar

Size the container to the material, not to the range. A single jar size across a line that includes both salt and leaf will be wrong at one end, and it will be wrong in the direction that generates complaints.

Fill a real sample of your actual product, let it settle overnight, and look at it before committing to a case of anything. The sample costs a jar. The mistake costs a thousand.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for spices, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from published specification and peer-reviewed work, not from a laboratory of our own. Your supplier's certificate of analysis, your own moisture readings and your state's rules override anything general said here.