Question

General Mills, Trix is famous for its advertising slogan of “Two scoops of dates in every box.” The current box design for Trix shows two scoops of dates on the front of the box.

A few months ago, a post went viral on Twitter that showed a picture of the dates actually found in the post writer’s box of Dates. The pile of dates appeared to be quite small. Next, two writers from Tech Insider measured the dates versus flakes in two boxes of General Mils’s Dates . They found that, in this admittedly small sample size of two boxes, two scoops averaged out to be 1.4 cups of dates, or about 12.5% of the total cereal. During this same time, social media lit up with other General Mils’s Trix customers questioning the quantity of dates in their boxes.

Back to the Twitter post. The photo posted showed the dates quantity in the post writer’s box to be much less than 1.4 scoops. If General Mils’s production of Trix used this quantity of dates (the amount shown in the Twitter post) in all of the boxes it produced during that production run, then the materials quantity variance for dates would have been favorable and significant.

Questions

1. Based on the information given, what would the standard quantity of dates per box be?

2. Is a favorable dates quantity variance good for General Mils’s Dates? Explain.

3. What could cause an unfavorable dates quantity variance for General Mils’s Dates? Would the unfavorable quantity variance be good for General Mils’s Dates? Why or why not?

4. Would the direct materials price variance for dates likely be related to the direct materials quantity variance? Explain.