For years I’ve been buying beans (and also rice) at Fred Meyer that came in a one-pound bag of thin plastic that flopped around. This was fine by me.
Then, one day Fred Meyer’s bean (and rice) bags all got thicker, until they could stand up. They also developed a zip-top closure. This seemed excessive for me, as I usually either make the whole batch of beans in the bag, or pour extra into a mason jar to store. But it wasn’t actually a troubling thing, so I rolled with it.
Today I went to grab a bag of black beans, and *poof* all the beans had been converted back to the original thin-plastic floppy bags.
What gives? File this under: changes I don’t know about and will never know about.
Hmmmmm….
Found a pile of old packaging leftover and didn’t want to waste it?
Different processing centers have different packaging and they switched?
Fussy people complained?
Money needed to be saved, and as you said, improvements didn’t make much improvement but were likely more expensive to produce?
There are some of my unasked for theories! 2 minutes and 4 posts left…looks like you get more than 2 minutes! The schedule is slightly loose today!
All good theories.
They were probably testing it out to see if it would be more cost effective. Either it wasn’t, or customers reacted poorly to the change, so they went back to the way things were.