“Same great taste.” Three words that ought to trip the same alarm as “the cheque’s in the post” or “your call is important to us.” When a food company goes to the trouble of printing a reassurance on the packet, it is generally because something has changed, and generally not in your favour. The trick is that these days you can’t always find out what.
We’ve all been trained, over the past decade, to watch the pack. Shrinkflation became a national parlour game: the chocolate bar with the newly generous gaps, the crisp packet that’s mostly nitrogen with a garnish of crisps, the loo roll that seems to run out on a Tuesday when it used to last the week. Toblerone became the poster child back in 2016, when Mondelez widened the valleys between its Alpine peaks and a nation briefly lost the plot. The Office for National Statistics even put a number on the sport, counting 2,529 products that shrank between 2015 and 2017 while their prices sat there, bold as brass, refusing to budge.
Here’s the thing, though. Shrinkflation, for all its cheek, is an honest con. You can weigh it. You can hold last year’s bar next to this year’s and do the arithmetic on the back of a fag packet. The ONS adjusts its inflation figures for pack sizes precisely because size is measurable. The grocers know we’ve clocked it, which is exactly why the game has moved on — to somewhere the scales can’t follow.
Enter skimpflation, a term coined by the American radio outfit NPR’s Planet Money back in 2021 to describe something subtler and nastier: same price, same size, worse thing. Not less of the product — less in it. The recipe gets quietly reworked. The expensive ingredient gets nudged down the ingredients list, or off it entirely, replaced by something that does an impression of the original at a fraction of the cost. Butter becomes palm oil. Cocoa gets thinned. The fish finger becomes, incrementally, a breadcrumb delivery system.
And unlike a shrunken Wagon Wheel, you can’t prove it at the shelf. The consumer group Which? has been doing the forensic work here, comparing old ingredient lists against new ones and catching reformulations the packaging never mentions — its investigations found, among other things, that Clover spread had quietly dropped the buttermilk from its recipe. That’s the pattern: no announcement, no sticker, no “now with less of the good stuff.” Just a product that tastes a bit off, performs a bit worse, or falls apart a bit sooner, and a customer left wondering whether it’s the product or their memory that’s gone ropey.
Now for the bit that should really get your back up. According to the research underpinning this piece, of the businesses caught cutting corners in this fashion, roughly nine in ten pocketed the saving rather than passing any of it on. Not “we’ve had to compromise to keep prices down.” Not “tough choices in tough times.” Just: cheaper thing, same price, thank you very much, mind the door on your way out. The cost-of-living crisis provided the perfect smokescreen — everyone expected things to get dearer, so nobody blinked when they merely got worse.
There’s a wonkier scandal buried underneath the obvious one. The official inflation figures can cope with shrinkflation, because a smaller pack at the same price registers, correctly, as a price rise. But a degraded recipe at the same size largely sails through undetected. The statisticians have no systematic way of scoring the disappearance of buttermilk or the slow retreat of actual chicken from the chicken soup. Which means that whenever quality is being quietly gutted across the economy, the inflation you feel runs hotter than the inflation you’re told about. You’re not imagining it. The spreadsheet just can’t see it.
And it doesn’t stop at the supermarket. Skimpflation’s original meaning was about services: the hotel that binned daily housekeeping and never brought it back, the airline call centre where the hold music has become a lifestyle, the restaurant where the menu survived the pandemic but the portions and the staff didn’t. Same price. Fewer humans. Longer queues. The pandemic gave everyone a cast-iron excuse to strip the service back, and an impressive number of firms have simply never got round to restoring it. Funny, that.
What’s to be done? Precious little by regulation — you can mandate that pack sizes be printed on the shelf label, and there have been noises in that direction, but you can’t legislate against a recipe getting stingier so long as the ingredients list is technically accurate. The only real defence is the old one: bloody-mindedness. Read the list. Compare it to the one on the jar at the back of the cupboard. When something tastes worse, trust your gob over the marketing.
Because the packet will keep telling you it’s the same great taste. It isn’t, it knows it isn’t, and it’s betting you can’t prove it. Shrinkflation was a pickpocket you could catch in the act. Skimpflation is one that’s nicked your wallet and left an IOU written in invisible ink. That’s not inflation. That’s taking the piss — with a barcode on it.