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New Delhi, May 9 Stung by the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC)’s probe into the alleged move by FMCG companies to reduce the weight of products discreetly without slashing prices, industry chamber FICCI has come to the defence of the industry saying that many manufacturers chose to declare lower net weight rather than the actual grammage to take care of the weight loss due to environmental and other conditions during a product’s lifetime.

“Following the amendments to the Packaged Commodity Rules, restricting manufacturers from declaring net weight when packed and also bringing down tolerances on the net weight declaration from May 1, 2008, many manufacturers chose to declare a lower net weight rather than the actual (higher) net weight. This is being done to take care of the weight loss of the packaged commodities due to environmental and other conditions during the lifetime of the product…the feedback received from the manufacturers reveals that in the entire controversy what is lost sight of is the fact that the industry seems to have acted uniformly,” FICCI said in a statement here.

When contacted, a senior official said that the Director-General of Investigation and Registration (DGIR) — the investigation arm of MRTPC — would send out the probe letters to various companies in the next 2-3 days. “These are FMCG items where customers buy a product by its name and do not regularly check its weight. Since, fundamentally the companies should have publicised any reduction, this particular move may be seen as a deceptive trade practice,” a senior Government official said.

In a statement, FICCI said that its evaluation of a cross section of commodities had revealed that overtime from the date of manufacture of a product, variations arose in weight which was not only unequal across regions but also across product categories and their respective unit size. “The weight change in case of products may vary as much as 10-12 per cent during the shelf life of the product and even higher in case of products having high moisture content,” it claimed.

“The industry is of the view that ‘grammage adjustment’ to address the weight variation issue will incur huge cost on various FMCG products affected, for example, manufacturers of dairy products such as ice-cream and butter where addition of a small quantity will incur huge cost and increase the cost of manufacturing, reducing profits margins, significantly,” FICCI said.

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