companies are delusional if they think consumers don’t notice shrinkflation. less food in the package, less medicine in the jar, less whatever in the wherever, it doesn’t matter where and it’s almost always noticeable. like i just finished one box of medicine and we opened another allegedly identical one that we just bought and lo and behold, the four middle medicine segments were gone from the package. they took out four pills from the same sized box and sold it at the same price without any indication on the box other than the small number in the corner. ridiculous
I bought a carton of my favorite tomato soup last week and noticed that the nutrition facts looked weird. So I compared the new one to the mostly empty carton already in my fridge.
The serving size was the same, but the calories per serving had gone down by like 15. Odd. The ingredients list previously listed tomato as the first ingredient, and then water. Now water is first. They’re watering down the fucking soup and charging the same for it. I’m so fucking done.
This sort of thing is also really infuriating when you work in a kitchen or make bulk food for serving- in my field, everything is done by weight and calculated to the calorie (public school cafeteria) and all recipes need to be approved by a board before we can make them. They’re standardized, by fucking law.
So we should know how many boxes of product it should take to make x amount of servings, right?
Tell me why for the last two years, every time we make mashed potatoes with the supposedly same dehydrated mix, we need more and more mix to reach our numbers? Supposedly, one carton should make 77 servings- it’s made 77 servings for the last five years.
So why are we suddenly only getting 70 out of the box on average now? We’re making it the exact same way every time. We make this recipe every other week. Why is it noticeably different.
We have to weigh everything to get accurate serving counts for governmental records and reimbursement from the government.
Why are the bags of frozen berries that say five pounds on every packags only weighing out to 4.3 pounds at best? We aren’t draining them, they should weigh at least 4.9 because that’s normal in the margin of error and the bags weigh nowhere near the difference to make it up. Now we won’t have enough to make our target serving count bc we only ordered enough for about fifty extra servings like we always do.
Why is the chicken nugget brand we’ve been buying for years from the same brand suddenly way fucking smaller? The serving we use is 6 pieces bc legally we have to offer two grams of protein for a menued meal at the highschool level- so has our serving size changed without them telling us? The box doesn’t say it’s changed but we notice this sort of thing because we do the same menu every couple of weeks.
It’s infuriating to have to make up the work because companies are trying to be fucking sneaky about this shit.
Also maddening as hell if you’re on or know anyone who’s on the WIC program in the US, because things like baby cereal are on vouchers specifically by weight, not price. So if that cereal you got last month was, say, 32.5 ounces, and the company decided to pull some shrinkflation bullshit and change it to 28.2 ounces for the same price or whatever without telling the WIC offices, you can’t get it with the voucher this month, even though it’s the same cereal with the same label and the same price. It’s not the right weight anymore. Tough shit. Maybe it’ll get fixed next month, only for the company to screw everyone over by changing the weight again.
They cut corners and cut corners and cut corners and cut corners
And now they have a perfect sphere/circle
So now they’re straight up making it smaller cause that’s the only way to cut even more
This is not sustainable
They will be left with a literal nothing if they continue