Program designed to protect consumers gets a facelift

    Do you go through the self-checkout at the grocery store? Do you check in your luggage at the airport?
    The Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Weights and Measures program has updated the approval sticker used to identify if a commercial scale weighs correctly. Because scales fall out of tolerance, CDA inspectors test every commercial scale used in Colorado each year to ensure their accuracy. That is over 25,000 commercial scale inspections completed by a team of CDA inspectors.
    To grasp the impact of these inspections, consider that a single supermarket can easily conduct 1-2 million transactions involving a weight of a commodity per year at the meat department, deli, bakery and checkout stands. A farmer purchases feed, fertilizer and pesticides and then sells their commodities by the ton. There are highway scales, shipping scales, jeweler scales, grain scales and now high precision cannabis scales.
    The financial impact of a weights and measures program is so significant that experts have found it impossible to quantify.
    “We test and approve scales to help ensure the equity and integrity in the marketplace. With our newly designed sticker, we hope to highlight the impact that agriculture and the CDA has on the everyday lives of all Coloradans,” said Hollis Glenn, CDA’s Inspection & Consumer Services division director.

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