Shrinkflation: Why you’re paying the same but getting less

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Have you noticed some of the products you buy are getting a little… smaller?

We are paying the same but getting less at the grocery store as many food manufacturers try to mask rising costs with a retail strategy called “shrinkflation.”

“It is essentially a manufacturers strategy to reduce quantities without playing around with pricing,” says Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, adding it’s usually a response to rising commodity prices — when input costs increase, manufacturers tend to reduce quantities.

“Over the years we have seen several products being reduced in terms of quantity, whether it’s grams or millilitres, and they actually alter the packaging so you basically get an illusion that you are buying the same quantity, but you’re not,” he tells NEWS 1130.

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An original package of Oreo cookies, for example, has shrunk by about three cookies to 270 grams from 303 grams, a roughly 10 per cent reduction by weight.

A bag of Lay’s potato chips now weighs 165 grams, down from 180 grams, Quaker Chewy granola bars come with five bars rather than six or 120 grams instead of 156 grams, and Armstrong cheese is 600 grams rather than 700 grams.

Food producers have also redesigned orange juice bottles to create a larger hollow bubble of space on the bottom, giving consumers the impression that the bottle is the same size while in fact reducing the amount of juice.

“Most of these products are at the centre of the store and most of them are processed — cookies, crackers, pasta, even bacon has been affected by shrinkflation,” says Charlebois. “It’s anything packaged, really, including chocolate, juices, pizzas, all of these products have often been impacted by shrinkflation.”

He says the strategy can be stretched out over several years.

“It’s very subtle and most people wouldn’t notice at all. You may actually find that the quantities may be the same but they will reduce the size of a unit, like a cracker or a cookie, but after a while they actually reduce the number of units in a package so you end up with less quantity.”

But there could be a silver lining, of sorts, when it comes to food waste.

“We often report that people tend to buy too much food which leads to household waste, so shrinkflation could actually make people waste less food overall,” says Charlebois. “I know a lot of people are upset when they hear they actually get less for their money, and it does contribute to inflation, but generally speaking we are buying less and perhaps wasting less. It has yet to be measured but it is a very strong hypothesis.”

The biggest concern, he argues, is that perhaps shrinkflation is underreported by public agencies like Statistics Canada.

“We are not entirely convinced that the monthly consumer price index (which compares the cost of a fixed basket of goods and services over time) actually captures the impact of shrinkflation. For example, bacon is part of that list that StatsCan follows very closely. It is still listed as 500 grams, but most manufacturers don’t sell 500 gram packages anymore.”

-With files from The Canadian Press