Tiny Bites

The latest item from Kellogg's Special K (a brand that long ago lost any relationship to nutrition) is Brownie Bites, blobby little items each about ¾ inch square and ¼ inch thick — smaller than half a domino. More like a Brownie Nibble.

Whether they're any good is a matter of opinion. But Mr. Tidbit believes that anybody who opened the box, then opened one of the six foil pouches would see that there is a lot less Brownie Bite than he or she expected.

Each pouch is puffed up to contain a nice volume of air in addition to the Brownie Bites. In fact, there's more air than brownie — enough to make the six pouches almost seem to occupy most of the space in the box.

Besides all that air, one foil pouch contains 10 of the little brownie items, weighing (according to the label) a total of 0.74 ounces. In Mr. Tidbit's fluid-displacement lab (a measuring cup), he measured the volume of the 10 Brownie Bites in a pouch to be the rough equivalent in volume of 1 ½ Oreo cookies.

The box measures a little more than 8 by 4 ½ by 2 ½ inches — a little over 6 cups in volume. When he emptied the contents of all six pouches into a measuring cup, the total volume of Brownie Bites (including the incidental air space between them) was a tad more than 1 cup.

Wow.

Fewer Oreos

To make the above comparison with Oreo cookies (but mostly because he was out of Oreo cookies), Mr. Tidbit bought a new bag, and found that he had missed this:

Although several varieties of Oreos are still in 15.25-ounce (39-cookie) packages, the bag of regular Oreos is now 14.3 ounces, and holds just 36 cookies.

It was just 1 ½ years ago that the 15.5-ounce package of regular Oreos arrived. The 18-ounce (45-cookie) package had disappeared only a year earlier. (The 16.6-ounce package came in between, but didn't last long enough to discuss.)

Al Sicherman