The most important test on most of our products other than white milk is total solids.
The machines we use to measure total solids can also measure moisture. Moisture and solids make up 100% of a product. The moisture percentage is 100 - total solids; the solids percentage is 100 - moisture.
Simple enough?
The machines default mode is moisture, even though we don't use that setting at all. One of these machines had an error last night (thermal overload, happens when the machine gets rated with the cover not locked closed. To fix the error message, you turn it off, wait a minute, and turn it back on. When it turns back on, it is in moisture mode.
For a soup whose solids are approximately 2.85, the readings if you don't change the settings say 97.15 M.
The tech testing this soup didn't know about the thermal overload and somehow read the 97.15 as .97. She called the tetra supervisor because the solids were less than half of what they should be!
Both lines got shut down, they were running to check the raw tank, get a line fill, find the problem. How could the solids drop out like that and the salt still be okay?
They figured it out eventually, but the panic and chaos caused because someone just wasn't paying that much attention? Hilarious.
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