Analysis of an Argument Essay

1st essay

In the annual report of the Olympic Foods Corporation to its stockholders, it has been argued that soon enough it will be able to minimize the costs of food processing, thus maximizing its profits. This argument is based mainly on the assumption that different products have similar production processes and their costs can be lowered merely by improving the efficiency of these processes. However, in my opinion, this argument is flawed, since there are several additional aspects of the process that haven’t been taken into account.
One major flaw in the line of reasoning is the parallel drawn by the company between the film processing and the food processing, which are not necessarily comparable, since the processing of film is based on a completely different product and technique than the processing of food. I believe that the argument could be more persuasive if the example given in it would describe an area of processing closer to the food processing. Such example will make the comparison more reasonable, assuming that in similar products the techniques of processing is more similar.
Additionally, the argument is flawed since it assumes that the profits of the company would grow based solely on its experience, not taking into account the costs of the material used in processing – possibly more dependent on different   aspects other than the efficiency of the process itself. This argument could be strengthened if the author could show the stockholders that those different aspects of food processing like price of water, soil and fertilizers, crop abundance or environmental variable have little effect on the production cost of processed food.
The points raised above reflect several major flaws in the line of reasoning presented in the report. For this reason, I do not find the conclusion drawn in the Olympic Foods’ annual report sufficiently reasonable.