Question: At its Lyle Avenue plant, Milan pasta produces two types of pasta: spaghetti and fettuccine. The two pastas are produced on the same machines with different settings and slightly different raw materials. The fettuccini being a wider noodle and more susceptible to curling edges requires more inspection time. The total daily cost of inspection is $500. Here are daily production data for the two products:

Pounds produced 6000 2000

Machine minutes per pound 0.20 0.40

a. Calculate the inspection cost per pound of pasta using traditional absorption costing with number of machine hours as the allocation base.

b. Calculate the inspection cost per pound of pasta using activity based costing. Assume inspection time is the cost driver.

c. Analyze why inspection costs differ between the methods used in (a) and (b).