Shrinkflation bites: Biscuits to disappear from packs of Penguins and Digestives

The shrinkflation curse has struck again with at least three biscuits set to disappear from each packet of McVities Digestives on sale in Ireland in the days ahead - and retailers unlikely to reflect the downsizing in the prices charges.

While packets of 400g digestives from McVities are still available on supermarket shelves this week they won’t be for much longer, with the makers confirming to The Irish Times that they are to be replaced with 360g packets as a result of “industry wide inflationary pressures”.

The move will see the number of biscuits in each packet of digestives falling from 27 to 24.

In a further blow to biscuit lovers, anyone hoping to p-p-p-pick up a penguin in the days ahead will notice that multi-packs of the chocolatey treat are considerably lighter, with McVities confirming it is also shrinking the size of Penguin multi-packs from eight to seven.

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In a statement, Pladis, the Turkish company behind the brand, said that the “pack content of our products are subject to periodic change to reflect consumer preference, customer demand, affordability and industry-wide inflationary pressures. Like many businesses, we continue to see an unprecedented rise in input costs”.

Pladis stressed that it has a policy of “openly” discussing shrinkages with retailers but it said that they are all free to charge customers what they wish.

[ Grocery price inflation reaches record high of 16%, data shows ]

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Shrinkflation, the practice of shrinking the size but the not the price of a product, is commonplace across the supermarket sector as manufacturers seek the maintain their profit margins without increasing their prices to a level consumers will not accept.

According to a report published by the UK’s Office of National Statistics several years ago, more than 2,500 products commonly found on supermarket shelves there – and here – decreased in size or weight in the five years between 2012 and 2017 with everything from chocolates to juices to toilet rolls impacted.

Sometimes that shrinkage is dramatic. When the Yorkie bar was launched in Ireland in the mid-1970s, its unique selling point was its size with the ads claiming that it had to be bigger than other chocolate bars because truckers needed more sugary goodness to keep them going on long drives.

On its launch day it weighed an impressive 70g. Today the Yorkie bars weighing just 46g. Twixes have lost 13.8 per cent of their volume in recent times while Kit Kat Chunkys are 17 per cent less chunky than they once were.

McVitie’s cut the number of Jaffa Cakes in a packet from 12 to 10 in recent years while Toblerone famously made the gap between the chunks in some of its chocolate bar wider while keeping the size of its packaging the same in the wake of Brexit in 2017.

Tropicana used to sell litres of juice and now sells 900ml cartons and in some instances 850ml cartons; while Innocent has also shaved 100ml off the size of its one-litre smoothies.

Birds Eye, meanwhile, gave everyone the two fingers – or more accurately took the two fingers away – when they started selling packets of 10 instead of packets of 12.

In 2015 there was 750g of mixed vegetables in a Birds Eye Select bag. Then it fell to 690g and this week the bags of frozen vegetables weighed in at just €640g.

One-litre tubs of Carte D’Or ice cream became 900ml tubs and have fallen further in recent times to 750ml while a Magnum ice cream which used to be 360ml is now 330ml.

Shrinkflation does not just apply to food and some of the sneakiest shrinks happen in domestic cleaning products.

Some brands of toilet paper have lost well over 10 per cent of the number of sheets per roll without any corresponding drop in price.

A packet of 48 Persil washing tablets became a packet of 40 with packets of 38 now commonly found on supermarket shelves while Cif Actifizz Multi-Purpose Lemon Spray reduced in size from 750ml to 700ml now.

Consumer advocate Dermott Jewell said the latest move by McVities was just another example of price hikes “being imposed by the back door.”

“This is not new and it has been the case for many years,” he said. “So much so that it is being taken for granted and that is a difficulty. Suppliers have decided that consumers don’t like price increases so they reduce the size as if they are doing us a favour when in fact they are doing quite the opposite.”

He said the “increases by the back door are causing serious confusion, particularly over the last two years and they are seeing people visiting shops more and buy often and spending more and more money but still coming home with less.”