This woman claims she has a hack to get her chicken free nearly every time. It all has to do with the weight.
“I don’t pay for my chicken anymore,” she says in a viral TikTok. “And I’m gonna tell you how you can get yours for free, too.”
Amanda (@amandahhhhhhugnkiss on TikTok) says she weighs every meat she buys from the grocery store—and often, it doesn’t measure up to what it claims on the label.
Mislabeled Perdue chicken
“I would say it’s maybe 1 out of 10 packages actually meet the weight that’s on the label,” she claims.
Amanda includes a photo of Perdue chicken she recently bought. The label says it should contain 3.97 pounds of chicken. However, when Amanda measured the meat herself at home, she says it only came to 2.6 pounds.
She then called Perdue Farms out on it. Amanda says that’s how she was able to get a full refund.
“I called Purdue, I reported all the information on this label, and within a day or two, three or four days, I’ll get a check in the mail for the price that I pay for this meat,” Amanda says.
Perdue Farms is one of the nation’s top chicken, turkey, and pork producers. The company controls roughly 7% of the U.S. chicken market—the third largest corporation behind Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson.
The TikToker adds in her video that she not only does this to save money—but also on the principle that customers should get what they pay for.
“Some people call me cheap… for doing this, but I believe that if a package says 3.97 pounds, there should be 3.97 pounds of meat,” she adds. “And that is without the packaging. Companies are not supposed to include that in their measurements. So weigh your meat next time, and you’ll be surprised that you are getting ripped off as well.”
Amanda did not mention what grocery store she purchased the chicken from.
What is the Office of Weights and Measurements?
As Amanda mentions in her video, the Office of Weights and Measurements is an agency part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The agency “works to ensure that consumers get what they pay for and sellers get fair payment for the goods and services they sell by promoting a uniform and technically sound system of weights and measures.”
The agency works in tandem with state governments, who regulate weights and measurements of goods.
The issue of weight fraud in food, also known as food fraud, appears to be handled by a variety of agencies, however, as the Food and Drug Administration notes on its website.
Are food producers frequently guilty of mislabeling food weights?
Several retail food chains have found themselves embroiled in lawsuits or controversies over weight fraud.
In 2015, Whole Foods was found to be “overexaggerating” the weights of prepackaged food goods. According to ABC, one of those items happened to be chicken tenders, which were overpriced by over $4.
And just last year, in 2024, Walmart was the subject of a weight fraud class action lawsuit. It alleged that the nationwide retail chain overcharged customers for weighted goods, including meats like chicken, among many other products. The lawsuit settled with Walmart paying out $45 million.
Similarly, grocery chain Alberstons settled a $3.9 million lawsuit for “falsely advertising” weights of products, per Desert Sun.
So—perhaps Amanda’s estimate of 9 in 10 meat weights being improperly labeled isn’t too far off.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Perdue via email, and to Amanda via TikTok direct message.
Update 4:37pm ET May 20: This story has been updated to correct the claim that Amanda says 1 in 10 meat weights are improperly labeled. She actually claims 1 in 10 labels to have the correct weight.
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