This true story was told to David M. Himmelblau by Professor Gene Woolsey:Once upon a time a big manufacturer of canned frozen orange juice concentrate found that 12% to15% of the concentrate...

This true story was told to David M. Himmelblau by Professor Gene Woolsey: Once upon a time a big manufacturer of canned frozen orange juice concentrate found that 12% to 15% of the concentrate disappeared someplace between Florida and the storage warehouse in the Northeast. A chemical engineer was called on to solve the problem. When she arrived at the Florida plant, the first thing she noticed was a stink caused by a number of dead alligators floating on the surface of an adjacent lake. Ignoring the smell, she carefully followed the processing of the orange juice from squeezing, through concentration, and cooling to slush. She watched the waiting trucks being steam cleaned and sanitized, and then the slush being pumped into the trucks prior to being sent off to the warehouse. The trucks were weighed before and after filling. She placed a seal on one or two trucks and flew to the warehouse district to wait for “her” trucks to come in. On arrival she noted that the seals were undisturbed. A pump was attached to the bottom drain of a truck, and the slush was pumped out into a holding tank until the pump started sucking air, at which time the pump was disconnected. Then she watched the cans being filled from the holding tank, counted the cans, had some weighed, and noted a minor amount of spillage, but the spillage and filling operation amounted to less than 1% of the overall loss. At this point she concluded that either (a) cheating was going on in Florida, and/or (b) someone was stealing cases or concentrate from the warehouse. She spent a couple of nights in the warehouse and did note that someone took a couple of cases of concentrate, but that amount had negligible effect on the overall loss. Two weeks later while drinking orange juice at breakfast, she had a sudden idea as to what the company’s problem was. What was it?