Shrinking sweets? 'You're not imagining it,' ONS tells shoppers

For all those shoppers who feel chocolate bars, cartons of drink, toilet rolls and countless other products have been getting smaller, now comes official confirmation. A grand total of 2,529 products tracked by the Office for National Statistics have decreased in size over the past five years.

In an analysis of the phenomenon known as “shrinkflation”, the ONS explored whether these dwindling portions are making life more expensive. The theory goes: if a chocolate bar gets smaller but the price stays the same, that is a form of inflation because you are paying more for each bite.

The issue has regularly made headlines over the last year following the decline in the value of the pound after the Brexit vote. Food manufacturers have blamed the slump in sterling for increasing the price of imported ingredients and looked for ways to recover their extra costs.

Toblerone, owned by Mondelez, spaced out its signature triangles so that there was less chocolate in each bar. Mars has shrunk its sharing bags of Maltesers by 15%. Doritos have downsized from 200g a packet to 180g, Peperamis have lost 2.5g and are now 22.5g and a big box of Coco Pops has been reduced from 800g to 720g.

Of the total number of products that have got smaller, 2,006 were food items. Items that particularly stood out as having shrunk over recent years were bags of sweets, soft drinks, disposable nappies and toilet rolls.

Only 614 products increased in size, including crisps and hand-rolling tobacco, following a change in the law requiring pouches to contain a minimum of 30g of tobacco.

The ONS assures the public it catches this form of inflation because its hundreds of price collectors around the country always check the size of an item as well as the price when they are gathering information for each month’s inflation figures.

Using its data, the ONS has now summed up recent size changes, highlighting food as particularly prone to shrinkage. But it is only in the very sweetest sub-category of “sugar, jam, syrups, chocolate and confectionery” that downsizing is having a noticeable effect on the official inflation figures.

James Brown, a partner at the firm Simon-Kucher, which advises companies on pricing strategies, said the downsizing made sense. “You don’t say: ‘I want to consume 120g of chocolate.’ We say: ‘I want a chocolate bar that costs 75p or less’,” he said.

“Shrinkflation is actually quite a successful tactic because a lot of shoppers are more sensitive to a price change than to a weight change.”

With manufacturers facing higher costs for energy, ingredients, transport and packaging costs, he predicted more shrinkflation to come.

Summing up its findings, the ONS said: “No, you’re not imagining it – some of your favourite sweets really are shrinking. In November 2016, Toblerone chocolate bars reduced in size by about 10%, provoking outrage online. And Maltesers, M&Ms and Minstrels have gone the same way.

“But it’s not just chocolate bars. Over the last few years, journalists have found examples of loo roll, coffee, fruit juice, sausages, beer and chips getting smaller without getting any cheaper.”

When the ONS looked at the data from the last five years, it found that “lots of the items we recorded had reduced in size or weight – mostly in the ‘food and drink’ category”.

But it said there was “no discernable effect” on inflation because food and drink was a relatively small part of the basket of goods and services that is tracked to gauge overall changes in the cost of living.

But the ONS said that so far there was no evidence that the Brexit vote was to blame for size changes, and pointed out that shrinkflation pre-dated the EU referendum.

The statisticians said most chocolate makers had blamed the need to downsize their products on rising raw material costs. But it pointed out that the European import price of sugar had been slowly falling since the middle of 2014. In March 2017 it reached its lowest level since records began in 1991.

Similarly, the statisticians said the price of cocoa had reached a five-year high in December 2015 as a result of droughts in the three biggest cocoa-exporting countries, but it had fallen sharply over the last year.

The ONS added: “Our analysis doesn’t show a noticeable change following the referendum that would point towards a Brexit effect.”

The figure of 2,529 shrinking products was taken from all the quotes recorded by collectors and the ONS said there could be some double counting if the same item was tracked by several people.

Mark Jones, a food and drink solicitor at Gordons law firm, warned shrinkflation could intensify in the years ahead.

“We will probably see a ‘double whammy’ after Brexit as inflation, labour shortages and tariffs could all mean pack sizes decrease and prices rise,” he said.