Several years ago my favourite Christmas chocolate, Terry’s chocolate orange, was reduced in weight from 175 grammes to 157 grammes (presumably to deliberately attempt to disguise the shrinkage by virtue of the fact that the brain would see the same three numbers and not notice that they were in a different order). They pulled off this sleight of hand by introducing small gaps between the segments, so were able to keep the product and the packaging the same physical size but reduce what they were actually giving to the consumer. This was just one example of brands reducing what they sold but keeping the price the same. It has become known as ‘shrinkflation’.
It seems that over the past few years everyone has been at the shrinkflation game. There’s almost been a pandemic of size reduction as a way to disguise price increases.
When I was younger we’d go to the pie shop or the chip shop and ask for a meat and potato pie. At some point these pies became potato and meat pies, presumably because the amount of potato in the pie became greater than the amount of meat and some bright spark no doubt considered that it would be misleading to the consumer to call it anything else.
In my opinion the best dunkie biscuit in the world is the custard cream. That creamy vanilla flavoured middle sandwiched between two beautifully decorated biscuits – for me, nothing beats dunking a custard cream in a mug of tea. No other biscuit comes close!
Over the years I’ve seen the size of packets of custard creams reduce. Fairly recently one of the large supermarket chains even changed the orientation of custard creams in the packet, with the result that the number of custard creams per packet reduced by two!
But in what I consider to be the most heinous shrinkflation crime ever, they’ve slowly been reducing the amount of custard cream in the sandwich. And it’s now got to the point where there is way more biscuit than there is custard cream.
If this goes any further there won’t be any custard cream in the custard cream and at that point what will we call them!!? I guess at that point we’ll be forced to ask the potato and meat pie knob?
Or maybe take the lead from the late superstar, Prince: The biscuits formerly known as custard creams?
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