General Mills, Trix is famous for its advertising slogan of "Two scoops of flakes in every box." The current box design for Trix shows two scoops of flakes on the front of the box.
A few months ago, a post went viral on Twitter that showed a picture of the flakes actually found in the post writer's box of Trix. The pile of flakes appeared to be quite small. Next, two writers from Tech Insider measured the flakes versus dates in two boxes of General Mills' Trix. They found that, in this admittedly small sample size of two boxes, two scoops averaged out to be 1.4 cups of flakes, or about 12.5% of the total cereal. During this same time, social media lit up with other General Mills' Trix customers questioning the quantity of flakes in their boxes.
Back to the Twitter post. The photo posted showed the flakes quantity in the post writer's box to be much less than 1.4 scoops. If General Mills' production of Trix used this quantity of flakes (the amount shown in the Twitter post) in all of the boxes it produced during that production run, then the materials quantity variance for flakes would have been favorable and significant.
Questions
1. Based on the information given, what would the standard quantity of flakes per box be?
2. Is a favorable flakes quantity variance good for General Mills' Trix? Explain.
3. What could cause an unfavorable flakes quantity variance for General Mills' Trix? Would the unfavorable quantity variance be good for General Mills' Trix? Why or why not?
4. Would the direct materials price variance for flakes likely be related to the direct materials quantity variance? Explain.