The New York Times published an enlightening article that reveals something currently happening right under our noses: food companies, trying to maximize profits during lean times, are simply giving us less product and charging the same price. They're taking advantage that most of us simply aren't paying attention to the quantity labels or aren't going to notice that the packaging they use are gradually shrinking. So long as the costs stays the same, they figure, no one's the wiser, like the proverbial frog in the pot.
“Bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Fritos,” the Times has discovered, “now hold 20 percent fewer chips than in 2009, though a spokesman said those extra chips were just a “limited time” offer.”
]
As the article points out: “And companies try to do it in such a way that you don't notice, maybe keeping the height and width the same, but changing the depth so the silhouette of the package on the shelf looks the same. Or sometimes they add more air to the chips bag or a scoop in the bottom of the peanut butter jar so it looks the same size.”
These companies also do it under the pretense of being greener, and “it lets retailers honestly claim, for example, that a snack package contains fewer calories–without having to change the ingredients a smidge.”
The glass-half-full type would say this is probably a good thing since we're eating too much processed food anyway; but the realist would say, we're friggin' being snookered! Doesn't it make you yearn for the SuperSize Me years?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.