Cocoa price rises could mean chocolate ‘shrinkflation’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clmy37xylj2o
by Glanza
Cocoa price rises could mean chocolate ‘shrinkflation’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clmy37xylj2o
by Glanza
35 comments
You mean on top of the already massive shrinkflation there has been. You can ask pretty much anyone and they’ll tell you that X chocolate bar is 3x the price for about half the product than 20 years ago. I remember having a quid to take to school for snacks and i could get a chocolate bar from a vending machine for 30p that was 33-50% bigger than the ones available today that cost about a quid.
Erm… has the BBC missed the last, I don’t know, 15 years?
A bit late BBC, people been buying basically miniture hero sized bars for a long time now.
You mean **more** chocolate shrinkflation?
The year is 2030. Its been a long day, so you decide to treat yourself to a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk on the way home.
The shop keeper gestures towards the card reader: £4.99.
You unwrap the chocolate salivating… and slowly tuck into your single chunk of chocolate, weighing in at 7.5g. What a treat!
Honestly the chocolate in the UK is just shit. Imported stuff isn’t much better either. And I’ve tried a lot. Way too much palm or vegetable oil, irrespective of brand, gooey and fucking weird aftertastes the world over. Dairy milk? Gross. Tony’s? Tastes like something out of an advent calender. All the premium, extra special stuff? Just shite. It’s all shit.
All of you moaning about this, it’s time to invest! The chocolate bar of tomorrow is 20% smaller? That means the chocolate bar of today is now worth 20% more
My chest freezer with 5000 double deckers in it is now a solid retirement plan
What used to be a 200g bar is already down to about 160g!
As though most chocolate isn’t just sugar. Exactly how much of this is supposed to affect the price.
And I am eating less. I guess that’s what they want?
Hold on you mean the previous shrinkflation wasn’t to do with rising costs.
Well bugger me. Greedy fuckers.
The fuck is the point in a chocolate bar anymore. They’re like £1 minimum, tiny, and half of them taste like ass.
The price rises were predicted a long time ago, BBC reported about it in 2018 already https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180926-could-we-be-facing-a-chocapocalypse
> Global chocolate market value keeps reaching new highs, potentially doubling by 2025 compared to its 2015 level. Consumption is mainly driven by perceived health benefits such as anti-aging, antioxidant effects, stress relieve, blood pressure regulation and others.
While growing cocoa is becoming more difficult:
> However, as a result of global warming, cocoa cultivation in these areas is expected to literally move uphill to maintain optimal growing conditions. The challenge remains in the limited areas of land available, as many of these locations are currently banned from cultivation or might not be suitable for it.
What chocolate? Most commercial chocolate is nothing but sugar and paml oil
i await my 10 gram bar of chocolate costing 1 pound.
This means we’ll just be getting empty wrappers.
Bought a Snickers to share the other day. When it was cut in half, they halves were smaller than the ‘Fun size’ ones. Although these are probably the size of a chocolate button now.
There’s definitely already been a lot of shrinkflation and a loss of quality generally. We used to get a tub of Roses for Christmas as a tradition. The last time, the tub was significantly lighter, they’d removed some of the varieties, and they’d changed the chocolate wrappers so that they took up significantly more space to give the illusion that it was fuller than it was.
That’s the end of that tradition; we won’t be getting them again because they’re just no longer worth the money, which is true for an increasing number of products.
So the end result is that I’m buying less chocolate now from the brands that I used to. If the quality and amount were the same but the price was higher, I could justify it now and then.
But the price being higher, the quality worse and the amount worse? Okay, I suppose I’ll just buy something else from an entirely different company, then, or just not bother at all. And then they’ll complain about sales falling and having to make cutbacks as a result, and it will get worse again.
That they’ve already done by stealth anyway. How about “Cocoa prices affect massive bonuses of corporate tossers” for a bit of change?
If cadbury’s buttons get any smaller they’ll need to be renamed Dots.
Shrinkflation has been happening for some time, go watch a 90’s tv show and see the bloody size of all the chocolate bars and whatnot.
Then theres the cocoa butter out of the beans, it isn’t being put back into the chocolate, rather it’s being sold on to the cosmetics industry for mega profits whilst they fill the chocolate with palm oil and pretend we won’t notice it now tastes like ass, this is also why white chocolate is now practically tasteless, it was all cocoa butter before. now it’s just bland, planet destroying palm oil.
we’re having to turn to euro manufacturers for any decent chocolate these days.
Yeah, whatever. I don’t buy chocolate anymore because fuck giving these greedy shits more money for a worse product.
Sign of the times… smaller, lower quality, more expensive. You can actually feel people starting to get pissed off with it now and just saying “it’s not worth it anymore”.
But I’m healthier for it, anyway. I’ll just stick to my bananas. Thanks!
I’ve genuinely stopped buying anything like this from shops over the last few years.
I can eat £20-£30 worth of junk in 1 sitting, it’s terrifying!!
Or I could go the butchers and green grocers for £15 and have an absolute banging meal with left overs or stuff for soup/stew next day :0
Takeaways the same!!!
I’ve never cooked proper food as when I was younger a takeaway was £5-£7 for curry and rice from a Chinese or Indian and they’d chuck in a free salad or crackers or pompadoms….pizza was £10 delivery with chips, garlic bread and drink, delivered!!!!
It’s now £20-£30 a delivery and the quality and size are terrible 🙁
The chocolate is diabolical though, I can make my own pack up for work for less than £5 and I’m rammed
For a £5 out a shop if I forget my lunch I’m lucky to get a bag of crisp a small mats bar and a 500ml drink…..
Chocolate bars about as long as my little finger and tastes like advent calendar chocolate :/
I’ve cussed a few takeaway owners out recently too…..
£18 for a 14 inch Margherrta pizza……collection!!!!
And it tasted like hot grease, cardboard and tomato sauce (ketchup)
8.99 for 3 piece of chicken and fires, inside the same tiny cardboard board box as fries!!!!
I can buy a f**king egg laying chicken that will produce for 2 years for £30-£50 and an entire chicken for eating can be bought for £3-£5 from supermarket!!!
In a way I’m greatful as I’m a lot more healthy now and have just built a chicken coop lol
But the price of things is astronomical and the fact no one notices is beyond me!!!
Coffee at a roadside in a ladybug out a horse box with a tea urn……£4.50
It was cheaper in the gas station :0
I’m not tight, I spend money on things I shouldn’t but I cannot see for the life of me the value in 100g of chocolate split into 4 bars is worth 3.99.
It’s bad for you, it tastes worse than it did, it doesn’t fill you up,
Costs loads, made of the back of impoverished workers around the world????
I’ll spend my dollar on some chicken wire and 4 point of lay birds!!!
Watch when I’m knocking out real pickled eggs and onions out my garden for £2.99 if ya bring the jar back or £4.99 if ya don’t!!!
Don’t even get me started in the price of a small bottle of water -.-
My god!!!
Cadbury ~100g bars have gone from £1 to £1.85 in five years in my local supermarket. That’s insane
Any more and we’ll just be getting a fucking IOU in a wrapper
Feels like we’re returning to rationing at this rate…
At this point, we are down to nearly empty wrappers.
Give me the product I want. I don’t want a 56g Mars bar made with so little cocoa it’s barely measurable. Come out with an executive Mars bar which was the same size oasis 30 years ago and tastes of the 3 main flavours.
Btw cocoa is struggling with crop failures because the regions that its grown in completely removed the local natural environment for cocoa plantations so now the crop is struggling due to possible soil degradation no woodlands to shield them from harsh environments.
I don’t like shrinkflation. I would rather the company just increase the price so I can easily see what I am paying.
With chocolate I always look at the price per gram and somewhere around £1.10 per 100g is around what I consider good value. But having to memorise price per gram for so many products is a pain and not really feasible – this is why companies love shrinkflation.
Companies should be required to put stickers on products they have shrank stating what the change is.
With the packaging to get more deceptive in making it seem like there’s more chocolate than you get.
I’m fine with shrinkflation as long as the pricing is clear, usually British prices in supermarkets have the ‘cost per 100g/kg’ which allows easy comparisons between different products for anyone who’s not stupid.
We should get the availability to buy really small portions of products, but we more or less should outlaw large different pricing for volumes. Generally ‘buy in bulk’ produces the greatest discount, its most visible in how the supermarkets price 1/2/4 pints of milk, last time I checked it was what 90p for a single pint about £1.60 for 4 pints. Which is really unfair as the cost of the plastic milk bottle can’t be more than 1 or 2 pence in relation to size, also 4 pints of milk doesn’t use 4x as much plastic as a single pint.
Another side effect of smaller sizes is it allows you to choose a variety of flavours in a more economical way. If a chocolate company produces multiple chocolate varieties in 100g bars, if they had them in 50g bars you could buy 2 different flavours for the same price (or an extra penny to account for packaging). Obviously there might be a slight difference to account for one using more expensive ingredients.
I though shrinkflation originally started with chocolate bars.
Need to ban Palm fat in foods, especially chocolate.
ASDA claimed that due to the cost of international transport the cost of BRITISH Lettuce being shipped from abroad meant they had to double their price. These are lettuce grown IN britain, for stores in britain.
Manufacturers lie.
Cadburys themselves have their “dairy milk bar”. the squares on top have wider rims, so there’s less chocolate in total.
The whole bar is thinner vertically horizontally and in depth.
They have a ‘new’ recipe which has a large amount of “cocoa replacement” flavourings, reducing the most expensive ingredient.
BONUS: Dairy milk etc now has ‘micro bubbles’. basically they’re too small to physically see but can ‘de-bulk’ the chocolate bar by 10-15% as its just air. (similar to air in ice cream but the air doesn’t have to be declared on the packaging). You’ll notice the mouth-feel of their chocolate is extremely poor now because of this but visually it looks the same.
Final insult: they changed the sweetener to high-corn fructose as its cheaper.
What could mean? Shits been shrinking quicker than rick moranis
Yeah sure would be a shocker to see chocolates be twice the price and half the size they were 15 years ago…
If they shrink any more we’d be measuring in moles not grams.