Shrinkflation and product quality

[Tinytimmy123]

I am putting this on AIBU but I don't really believe i'm being unreasonable, although im prepared for someone to come along and tell me that im asking for the impossible in some way.

I am getting increasingly mad infuriated and frustrated with diminishing quality and quantity but simultaneous increasing prices.

How are companies allowed to get away with this? The 'col crisis' seems to have been used for ongoing customer exploitation.

So many things smaller but more expensive, from toilet paper to food. Even the humble chocolate bar is being taken over by plastic shit but the price increases. Surely Consumer Rights should be able to insist on CLEAR reporting of recipe and quantity changes ?

All this because im running out of tissues in the middle of the night ! 😄

Absolutely, I bought some cereal bars the other day, and I noticed now there are only 4 in a box when there used to be 5 and whilst the wrapper is the same size the bar is a lot smaller. The price had also increased.

This was a product from a large FMCG company as well! One that historically had values heavily centred on corporate social responsibility none the less! These bars probably cost pennies to make in the first place and it’s not like there’s a lot of wastage through short expiration dates, but some bright spark at head office has probably found a way to save 0.003p per bar by making them smaller!

It’s totally exploitation and protection or even increase of already huge profit margins. In this cost of living crisis and increase in raw material costs, food manufacturers with already very healthy margins (I’m definitely not talking farmers here) should be prepared to run with slightly lower margins to protect food price inflation but they have instead used it as an excuse to raise prices and lower quantity and quality. The problem is they’ve got away with it.

There should be far more regulation on food pricing.

The real sad thing is that because people are spending money on food, they don’t have the funds to spend on other things and other sectors suffer.

For anything with chocolate in, the price of raw cacao has gone up massively in the last few years due to poor harvests in west Africa. And that is probably due to climate change.

if the % chocolate in the bar stayed the same, the price would have gone up even more.

and if the government tried to regulate the price, manufacturers would just stop making chocolate bars.

but I have no idea how they factor the shrinking into measures like the consumer price index. If they don’t, then real inflation would be higher than official statistics suggest.

I agree OP. Everything seems to be either tiny or crap quality these days.

In terms of reducing the quantity, Waitrose takes some beating IMO.

Im not an expert in chocolate other than eating it, but the excuse seems to be the rising cost of Cacao, but according to those in the know the 'chocolate' seems to have been nearly entirely replaced by plastic tasting replacements. Eg Dairy Milk apparently cant even call itself 'chocolate' now as per the front of the packet because it doesn't have enough or (?) any chocolate in it. My own feeling though is that this started long ago with the takeover by usually American confectionary companies using Palm Oil or the like in their 'chocolate'. Alot of chocolate now just tastes plastic unless you're prepared to go to more specialist companies. When I first.went to America on holidaymakers light years ago I tasted their chocolate and it was truly truly vile and now we seem to have been dragged down the same route.

God forbid that the Americans get any more influence over our produce in general. Watching American influencers saying how their bloating and gastric issues settled when they came on holiday or work placements in Europe should be enough of a warning never mind the whole chlorinated chicken issue.

Completely agree. I noticed my gins in tins had reduced from 2 units of alcohol to 1.6 - so they’ve cut the amount of gin in the tin by nearly a quarter yet the price has gone up by 50%. Yes yes, I know, hardly a staple - just my one little treat - and alcohol taxes etc but still.

Toilet paper! I bought a HUGE pack of rolls that have previously been decently thick and reliable only to find that they've either gone down a ply or used MUCH thinner paper and I'm now stuck having to use about a billion rolls of paper so thin that your finger goes through unless you use about half a roll every time.

Nothing is sacred it seems !

Clubs and I think penguins are now chocolate flavour coating

I’ve started making my own bars. Lots of oats, jar of peanut butter, condensed milk, half a dozen ripe bananas, butter, grated apple/ raisins. It does cost about £6 but it makes about 2kg.

I bought some Lu biscuits (those chocolate topped things) and where there used to be 12 in a pack, there is now 8. Thats a third missing. For the same price as before too.

Not buying them again.

Stop buying it.

I tried that peanut butter in a date with chocolate thing the other day and they're delicious. I'm going to make a batch of proper ones using the freezer and melted chocolate like you are supposed to, I just put a bit of each in my mouth when I tried it but I won't be buying sweets anymore, I'll be making these.

I bought a carton of Tropicana juice this week and thought it had leaked as it looked like it was only three-quarters full. Checked the back and the juice content is 850ml but using the 1l cartons so they look the same on the shelf!!

In the midst of my efforts to work out the most economical tissues and loo rolls it seems nearly impossible to compare. Not only is quality decreasing, thickness of the sheets, number of sheets and the actual size of the sheet . Im currently planning a new bathroom would love to get a bidet but my budget won't stretch to it.

Try Costco one brand still really good quality and get so much on the roll that it makes it good value

You are right, Possibly they think their customers prefer a reduction in quantity without compromising on the quality

If you look at Cadburys, they have actually removed that much cocoa content that they are no longer allowed to call it chocolate as there isn’t enough cocoa content.
If you look at the front of the bar it’s now simply called cadburys dairy milk. They have removed the word chocolate. Such a shame!
The price has still increased for poorer and smaller quality.

Kellogs frostie cereal bars were 6 for £1.25 now 4 for same price (this happened in September with return to school). My dc has afrid and its a safe food, eats one a day.

Re toilet rolls nicky ones on amazon go on offer regularly and are reasonable quality.

This has been going on for years and predates the cost-of-living crisis.

You mention tissues. Kleenex Balsam used to have 72/box, it changed to 64/box probably about 5 years ago. I used to pay £1/72, it has crept up to £2/64 so I now only (bulk) buy when it's on offer.

Also Jaffa Cakes go from 12/box to 11 then 10 - I stopped buying them.

Bahlsen used to be 9/box and is now 8/box, whilst I used to buy them on offer at £1/box (usual price £1.35?) they're now £2.25/box and on special they're £1.75. They're a special treat now.

Heinz ketchup in glass bottles was £1.20 pre-pandemic. It wasn't on the shelves for about 3 months (fair enough, manufacturing got interrupted for a lot of things back then) then when it reappeared it was £1.70. It's currently £3 and has been for quite some time. I buy other brands now.

The size always seemed to drop when it was approaching a 'price point', a cost that presumably their marketing dept had decided would be the threshold between customers still buying it or buying another brand. It was probably about ten years ago I watched Coca Cola's 2 litre bottle inch its way up to £1.99, then drop to 1.75 litres rather than go over £2.

Another trick I noticed would be that a product would go on special offer in absolutely every supermarket, then after a month or two the price would go back up but the size would drop simultaneously. That was a sneaky one! Or like the Heinz I mentioned earlier, things go off the shelves for a bit and come back much dearer, as if they think we'll have forgotten what it used to cost.

I completely agree. I don't have an issue with increasing prices but I do have an issue with deception which it feels like companies are doing by both increasing the cost and reducing the quality.

See other threads on mumsnet this morning ref digestives.

For the past few times I've cooked bolognaise I've been accusing DH of over eating as there are less leftovers, it was only when I saw the thread on mumsnet that the pack size had reduced that I understood why there was less leftovers!

Does Consumer Rights do anything about this or is this something we just have to endure?

Better to buy a litre of gin and mix it yourself then.

Which right could you claim was being breached? As long as they print the size/weight on the packaging, the goods are "as described".

Had a look on Which? magazine to say if they had anything to say on the matter of shrinkflation. They've been covering it for years, here are a couple of screenshots from their most recent report (13 Oct 2025).

Thank you WhereYouLeftIt for this. I think what I find most maddening is that when you get to the brass tacks of produce, for example farmers, they are usually operating on a smaller budget or as i saw on an instagram post recently, at a loss due to the large retail corporations undercutting them so much, so it isnt the farmers benefitting or putting on undue pressure.

While the labelling on products might be there, it is the larger packet but smaller product that makes it seem so fraudulent or underhand ...where will it end? Is there going to be some Christmas in the future where we get one quality street rattling around in a box covered in some plastic flavoured brown sludge pretending to be chocolate. As mentioned earlier Dairy Milk isnt even chocolate anymore and if you watch enough instagrammers reporting on labels of long established food brands ,( and often more expensive) so much now is fake, food and flavouring. So my feeling is that with each re I've change particularly venturing into the fake territory it should be made clear exactly what we are getting.