All tinned food
Food in cardboard packages such as breakfast cereals, crackers, biscuits
Food in plastic containers such as margarine, yogurt, cream, cottage cheese & salt
Food in jars for example jams, honeyand pickles
Food wrapped in paper, plastic or foil e.g. butter, cheese and cold meat
Drink in bottles like milk, soft drinks, water, water, wine and beer
Other bottled items such as cooking oil

Most packages and containers have standardised and sensible metric sizes. Typically these are expressed either as net weight or net volume. Since 1995 it has been compulsory to label these quantities in metric units. Examples are given in the table below.

Food	Common or standard sizes
Bread	400 g, 800 g
Breakfast cereal	350 g, 375 g, 500 g, 600 g, 750 g, 1 kg
Butter	250 g, 500 g
Cooking oil	250 mL, 500 mL, 750 mL, 1 L, 2 L, 3 L
Flour	500 g, 1 kg
Margerine	250 g, 500 g, 1 kg
Pasta	500 g, 1 kg
Rice	500 g, 1 kg, 2 kg, 5 kg, 10 kg
Sugar	250 g, 500 g, 1 kg
Yoghurt	150 g, 500 g

In a few cases there are some awkward hangovers from imperial such as the size of some milk containers and jam pots. Standard pack sizes work very well with your modern metric recipes that use quantities in round numbers of grams or millilitres.

Loose weighed food

Loose weighed food is commonplace at the greengrocer, the butcher, the fishmonger or at the delicatessen counter. This is therefore mainly fruit, vegetables, fresh meat, fresh fish, cold meats, cheeses and ready-made salads.

In market stalls, butchers and fishmongers the trader will usually pick, weigh and package the goods for you. In supermarkets and self-service greengrocers, you pick the fruit or vegetables required and they will be weighed for you at the checkout. Since 2000 it has been compulsory to use metric weighing equipment and to specify a metric unit price.

Countable items

Some loose fruit, vegetables and other goods e.g. garlic may be priced on a countable basis. Thus you may find, for example, garlic priced at ‘45 p each’ as opposed to a kilo unit price.