‘Metric Police’ Find Precision Is Sweet

Those little pink Sweet’N Low packets are undergoing a subtle design change. Chalk up a victory for sharp-eyed middle school students who make up the “metric patrol.”

“Adults are always telling us what to do,” said Noelle Ruggiero, 13. “Now we’re telling them.”

Noelle and her earth science classmates at Eastchester Middle School scan products for mistakes in metric labeling. They’ve written to companies whose products--bubble bath, vitamins, even a Harley-Davidson engine--were mislabeled.

Last fall, Noelle noticed that Sweet’N Low packets say they contain “1G” of artificial sweetener. But Noelle knew that the correct abbreviation for gram is a lowercase “g.” Under Commerce Department guidelines, an uppercase “G” stands for giga-, the prefix that means 1 billion, as in gigabytes.

She wrote to Cumberland Packing Corp., the New York-based manufacturer of Sweet’N Low. Her classmates were busy writing other companies with metric mistakes. But only Noelle got such a quick result.

“You are correct, our packets should be labeled 1g instead of 1G,” said a letter from Abraham Bakal, a consultant for Sweet’N Low. “We are now in the process of correcting this printing error.”

“I thought that was real nice of them,” Noelle said. “They didn’t insist they were right or anything.”

Bakal said the new and improved design should find its way to consumers within a few months.

“Teaching kids to pay attention to details is very important,” Bakal said. “Most consumers don’t even notice it. But you teach kids to pay attention to details and to be precise, and that’s why I felt it was a cute letter.”

Noelle seems unimpressed by her impact on the company that makes 50 million packets of sweetener a day, but she did like the T-shirt that Bakal sent along.

“It has the Sweet’N Low logo on it,” she said.

“It made her the envy of the class,” said her teacher, JulieAnn Hugick.

Most of the other companies cited by the students haven’t responded or have sent form letters. Harley-Davidson insists that “cc” is still correct for cubic centimeters though the standards called for a “cm” with a little “3” for “cubed” above it.

But there have been some successes.

Gojo Industries, maker of a waterless hand cleaner, told 13-year-old Michael Pierorazio that its packaging already had been changed, correcting the abbreviation for milliliters from “ML” to “ml.” But the president thanked him and sent free samples.

And the people at Dixon-Ticonderoga, after insisting that “GR” was a proper abbreviation for grams on their glue sticks, agreed to change them and sent 13-year-old Chris Orth some free pencils with aliens on them.

For now, unreformed products are on display in a cabinet in Hugick’s classroom.

It’s labeled “Metric Jail.”