Why are your cereal boxes and ice cream cartons shrinking

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You don’t lose your mind. You’re actually paying the same or more these days for the everyday items in your fridge and pantry, but you’re browsing them faster because they’ve shrunk in size.
The reason? A tactic known as “shrinkflation,” deployed by consumer brands and grocery stores. The phenomenon – getting less bang for your buck because a manufacturer downsized the product – has been going on for decades, but it usually becomes more common when business costs rise like the spike in inflation we see today.

When costs rise, manufacturers of consumer goods look for ways to offset the increases they pay for raw materials, transportation, labor, and other expenses. In response, they usually increase the prices of existing products or reduce the size of their products, thereby increasing the unit price of what you get. These increases are then passed on to buyers through stores, who purchase products from consumer goods companies.

Consumers are sensitive to price increases, but they pay less attention to the weight of a product. While product quantities are printed on labels, not many people take the time to do the math to figure out exactly what they are paying per ounce. This means that it’s easier for a brand to squeeze into a slightly smaller box on the shelf or remove a few sheets from a roll of toilet paper than to raise prices without consumers reacting and changing. maybe branded or don’t buy the product.

“Consumers are price conscious. They will notice if an orange juice maker, for example, increases the sale price from $ 2.99 to $ 3.19,” said Edgar Dworsky, former deputy attorney general of Massachusetts and long-time consumer advocate who tracks product reduction on his website. ConsumerWorld.org. “If the manufacturer makes the carton of orange juice several ounces less in each carton, they know consumers may not catch it. And that’s because consumers are unaware of the net weight.”

A long story

The shrinkage has a long history, according to Dworsky, and has led over the years to smaller toilet paper rolls, candy bars and chip bags.

Dworsky tracks shrinkage using eagle-eye readers and posts photos of small packages and net weights alongside previous versions of the products. There’s even a dedicated Reddit forum for shrinkage, documenting everything from the smallest sizes of deodorant to bottles of iced tea.

Some recent examples of products that have been lightened up, according to Dworsky: He discovered last week at a Massachusetts grocery store that the family-sized box of Cocoa Puffs had gone from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces, while Cinnamon Toast Crunch had fallen by 19.3 ounces. at 18.8 ounces. The new, smaller boxes were $ 3.99, the same price as the larger boxes. This means that consumers lost a bowl of cereal when they bought the new one.

Grocery stores are happy to charge you higher prices
General Mills (GIS) manufactures both brands. It “has worked to create consistency and standardization between our grain products, making it easier for shoppers to distinguish sizes on the shelves,” Kelsey Roemhildt, spokesperson for General Mills, said in an email. “For consumers looking for the best price per ounce. , the greatest value is normally found in our larger cereal boxes. “
Consumers are also getting less snacks for their money. A reader sent Dworsky pictures of a box of family-sized whole grain whole wheat that had gone from one pound in April to 14 ounces in May. The price was $ 3 for both boxes. (Mondelez (MDLZ), the maker of Wheat Thins, did not respond to request for comment.)

‘Flat-rate architecture’

Companies don’t often say they’re downsizing their products. Instead, they’ll say things like they’re adjusting their “price-pack architecture”. There has been a lot of talk about such changes recently with inflation on the rise and companies announcing price increases.

There is at least one company that has told its customers that it is downsizing because it is getting more expensive to manufacture.

Tillamook, an Oregon creamery, has announced that it is reducing its family-friendly 56-ounce ice cream container to 48 ounces due to the higher costs of ingredients like berries while maintaining the same price.

“In order to be profitable and support our owner-farmers, we had two choices: increase the unit price per carton or reduce the carton size from 56 ounces to 48 ounces and keep the price the same,” the company said. “It was a tough decision to make, but we decided to go for the latter so that the affordable cost per carton of ice cream doesn’t change for our fans.”

Some consumer goods analysts expect companies to reduce packaging size further due to the higher costs.

The producer price index, which measures the prices paid by companies, rose 7.3% in June from a year ago, according to the Ministry of Labor. June’s increase was the largest since the government began tracking 12-month data in November 2010.

Nik Modi, consumer goods analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said in an email that he expects the downsizing to be “a big move for most people. [consumer product] companies as part of their revenue growth management strategies. “

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