Kashi Pilaf is a general-purpose cereal mix consisting of the whole, unground cereal grains of oats, rice, rye, wheat, triticale, barley and buckwheat, with a small amount of sesame seeds. Is there any way to find out the exact ratios of these grains? Would they have to be divulged in a public patent application, for example?
Product recipes are protected as trade secrets. Although the ingredients have to be listed in order by weight, the exact ratios can be proprietary. They’re unlikely ever to be patented.
Crap. Well, I thought of another way to do it, but I can’t find my statistics textbook. I can differentiate the grains by sight and separate them into exclusive piles. Assuming a random distribution in a given sample, how big of a sample size would I have to count out to be 95% confident that my sample represents the actual distribution of grains in the population to within, say, 5%? Wiki’s article on confidence intervals doesn’t seem to be helping much, as I’ve never been very successful at grasping mathematical concepts from wiki descriptions. I need a dead-tree text, and even then it always involves a lot of skull sweat on my part. I got an ‘A’ in honor’s statistics, but I took the course in 2005 and now I just can’t remember how to do it.