Honey, they shrunk the groceries! Which? reveals more victims of shrinkflation and skimpflation

Have you picked up your usual butter, biscuits or teabags in the supermarket recently and thought they seemed smaller?

Known as ‘shrinkflation’, this is a way that food and drink manufacturers can cut costs without increasing the shelf price as much. 

But there’s also another way manufacturers are quietly cutting costs as inflation bites – and that’s by downgrading products' ingredients. If you’ve noticed your ready meal tasted different, sausages weren’t as meaty or guacamole was less, well, avocado-ey, you may be a victim of ‘skimpflation’.

Here we reveal the groceries that have shrunk in size or reduced in quality.

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Which groceries have shrunk?

We asked eagle-eyed shoppers to send us their examples of shrinking products or groceries with less of the key ingredients – and we’ve been inundated.

First up there’s Listerine, which is bound to leave a bad taste in your mouth after its Fresh Burst mouthwash shrunk from 600ml to 500ml. At Tesco it also went up in price by 52p – meaning shoppers paid 21% more for 17% less. When you work it out per 100ml, that’s a price increase of a staggering 46%.

Then there’s PG Tips, which might make tea drinkers’ blood boil if they realise they're getting 22% less tea for 27% more money. Boxes of PG Tips Tasty Decaf Pyramid tea bags went from containing 180 bags to just 140 at a number of supermarkets.

Many stores also dropped the price (although not always proportionately), but at Ocado the price actually rose from £4 to £5.09 despite the size reduction. That’s a 64% cost increase per tea bag.

Here are some more products that have shrunk but remained the same price – or become more expensive.

Andrex Classic Clean Flushable Washlets Moist Toilet Tissue WipesBisto Best Chicken Gravy GranulesCadbury’s Brunch Chocolate Chip BarsCoffee Mate Original WhitenerColgate Triple Action ToothpasteKettle Chips Sea Salt and Crushed Black Peppercorns CrispsLurpak Slightly Salted ButterMcVitie’s Digestives Dark Chocolate Biscuits Yeo Valley Organic Salted SpreadableFind out more: 

What about skimpflation? 

When it came to skimpflation, shoppers could be forgiven for feeling they’re getting less banger for their buck with Tesco Finest sausages, which have reduced from 97% pork to 90%.

Perhaps most blatant of all is the reformulation of Sainsbury’s ‘Clotted Cream Rice Pudding’, in which the clotted cream has actually been replaced with whipping cream, meaning no clotted cream is used in the pudding at all. 

The product packaging was renamed but it was still listed as 'Clotted Cream Rice Pudding' online until we pointed it out to Sainsbury's. 

Here are some more examples:

Morrisons Guacamole (150g)Morrisons The Best Lasagne Al Forno (400g)Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Lasagne Ready Meal (400g)Tesco Beef Lasagne (1.5kg)Tesco Tex Mex Chicken Enchiladas (480g)Waitrose Butter Chicken CurryYeo Valley Spreadable ButterFind out more: 

The impact of food inflation

And averages can only show so much: some types of food and drink have seen much higher inflation. For example, butters and spreads cost a whopping 30% more at the end of 2022 than at the same point in 2021 – so it’s not surprising that many of the shrinkflation and skimpflation examples readers told us about were on products with high dairy content. 

Meat is also an ingredient that seems to be ripe for reduction, featuring in many of the examples we found. Its peak inflation level was 15%, last May.

Find out more: 

The nutritional impact of skimpflation

Many manufacturers say these changes are a reflection of the costs they face and sometimes even claim that shoppers prefer the changes, with some recipe tweaks purportedly improving the flavour or healthiness of the product. They also pointed out that affordability is key.

For manufacturers looking to cut costs, reducing expensive ingredients like meat or dairy in their recipes is an easy solution, especially if they’re replaced with ‘fillers’. 

In sausages this might be various flours, and in lasagne it’s likely to be extra sheets of pasta – which are both cheaper ingredients. 

There is a positive side effect. Beef and pork contain more saturated fat than the fillers, so reducing them reduces the saturated fat content of a food. But it also lessens the protein content.

Find out more:

Have you noticed shrinkflation?

A huge 77% of shoppers have noticed shrinkflation in the last year, and 36% have spotted skimpflation*. But 45% said they would prefer product sizes to stay the same and prices to increase.

While you might think that shrinking products and downgrading their key ingredients is a sneaky tactic on the manufacturers’ parts, there are no rules against it as long as the packaging is labelled with the correct size, weight and ingredients.

The issue is that there’s no requirement to explicitly tell shoppers when there’s been a change, and so many don’t notice immediately – if at all. 

Find out more:

Shrinkflation ‘not transparent’

Of the shoppers in our survey, 75% said shrinkflation was not a transparent practice and 76% said it wasn't helpful.

It can also cause tension between the manufacturers that make the products and the retailers that sell them. It’s the manufacturer that’s responsible for changing the size or ingredients of groceries, but the retailer that ultimately sets the price. 

In France, this came to a head last year when supermarket chain Carrefour put labels on its shelves warning shoppers that certain groceries had shrunk in size. 

It’s an interesting idea. When we asked shoppers who should be responsible for flagging changes to them, 53% said it should be supermarkets and 32% said manufacturers. Just 9% thought consumers themselves should be responsible for noticing.

Find out more: 

How to check if your groceries have changed 

It’s very hard to know whether your favourite foods have been subject to skimpflation unless you happen to have some old packaging lying around, in which case you can compare the ingredients lists.

The same goes for shrinkflation: if you can’t remember the product’s previous unit price (such as cost per 100g) and don’t have any old packaging for comparing size and weight, it’s frustratingly hard to check. 

We’ve since been working with the Competition and Markets Authority, and now the government is taking forward our proposals for better unit pricing. 

It’s good news – but shoppers will still need to keep their wits about them to avoid being inadvertently taken in by shrinkflation and skimpflation.

Find out more: 

What does the food industry say?

The manufacturers we spoke to all emphasised that production costs such as raw materials, transport and packaging had risen and that pricing was set by retailers.

A spokesperson for Arla, which makes Lurpak, said average prices had reduced proportionately: ‘Our research showed that the new pack sizes and price points were the most appealing to a greater proportion of shoppers.’ 

Nestle, which makes Coffee Mate, said: ‘In order to maintain the highest standards of quality, it is sometimes necessary to make minor adjustments to the weights of our products.’

PG Tips manufacturer Lipton Teas said the average price of a PG Tips decaf tea bag fell 10% between January 2021 and January 2022. 

A Yeo Valley spokesperson said its new recipe was tested with consumers, adding that technological advances had made it possible to reduce butter and fat without compromising on taste or quality.

Waitrose said: 'Our focus is always on our customers and our new curry recipes performed better than the previous range in benchmarking tests. We've kept the same prices since this change and we continue to use industry-leading higher-welfare chicken from British farms across our entire ready meals range.'

*We surveyed 1,568 members of the general public between 13 and 16 October 2023.

source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/honey-they-shrunk-the-groceries-which-reveals-more-victims-of-shrinkflation-and-skimpflation-azOV07Q5FC5r