Slack fill complaint leads to empty feeling
Eric F. Greenberg, Attorney-at-Law

Consumer group the Center for Science in the Public Interest has asked the Food and Drug Adminstration and many U.S. states to suppress a problem the group’s head calls “commonplace.” It says “slack fill” in food packaging is cheating consumers.
As explained below, empty space in a package, or slack fill, is not a problem for regulators unless it is nonfunctional, and, as most packaging professionals know, there certainly are a lot of important functions that slack fill might serve.
It’s not really clear that this problem is big or getting bigger, and moreover, this is an odd time to complain about packaging being excessive.