At first Marcia, 66, thought she wasn’t trying hard enough to get the ketchup out. But it turns out she measured right, and the difference will cost the Heinz company more than $800,000 and 10 million oz. of ketchup.

Bill, 68, a retired carpenter who lives with Marcia in Redding, Calif., reported the discrepancy to the Shasta County weights and measures office, which investigated and found that the Bakers’ bottle wasn’t a fluke. “At a number of stores, bottles were short,” says Deputy D.A. Matthew Stegman. Last November, five years after Marcia decided to make meat loaf for dinner, Heinz, which blames moisture loss from its new recyclable plastic bottles for the missing ounces, agreed to pay civil penalties and investigative costs totaling $180,000 and to overfill by about 1/8 oz. all ketchup bottled in California for one year—which, state officials estimate, will cost the company about $650,000. Nevertheless, says company spokesman Michael Mullen, “I wish all ketchup consumers were as serious about their Heinz ketchup as [Baker] is.”