alt Hacker NewsMars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
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I was surprised to learn the Mars bar familiar from my childhood wasn't a product of the original American corporation Mars Inc.
Frank Mars founded the American company. His son Forrest invented Milky Way, but then eventually quarreled with his dad and was removed from the business. Forrest moved to England, founded his own company, and the Mars bar was his first product: a European version of Milky Way.
Later he inherited the original American business and merged the UK one into it.
Basically any "brand name" product which isn't either family owned or privately run by an extremely idealistic founder/CEO ends up getting predictably worse over time. Once some private equity fund buys you out and determines you are not on the quality/price Pareto frontier and can manage to lose only .8% of your revenue making your product .9% cheaper, the die is already cast.
We're tracking prices and packaging for food since 2012 at Open Food Facts, and we have a food archeology project: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Project:Archeology https://world.openfoodfacts.org/open-food-facts-mobile-app
Feel free to add what you have in your attic ;-)
Food reporting is often framed like this, as if the smaller size was a bad thing, or the price / gram, pound or ounce is the relevant criteria. Esp in the case of candy, you would think smaller sizes would satisfy the other framing for food items, esp in America, that over-sized food leads to obesity. It is a lose-lose framing, with nutritional value completely ignored. Instead, the reporting is always how people are being ripped off or making an unhealthy choice.
What a world we live in, that someone finding a 35 year old candy bar while cleaning out a hoarder's house gets its own tier 1 news article.
I am always reminded at a convenience store if I pick up a candy bar that some of my earliest memories include them costing 5 cents in the early 1970s that very quickly became 10 cents and by the late 70s, maybe 25 cents max for a standard size. Today, easily 10x this.
"20g" (actually 22.5g) hides the fact that it's 56% bigger than today's Mars bar...
Reducing the portion size for junk food is probably a good thing. This is a rare case where shrinkflation may actually be beneficial to all parties.
Checking Amazon UK[0], it seems there are 18g, 39.4 g and 51 g Mars bars (and 57 g Mars Protein bars). So it's not clear weather a 60 g Mars bar is that much of a good example of shrinkflation, but 40 g seems to be the wrong comparison.
Just my personal anecdata, it took my a while to put a finger on it, but it seemed like something started to change in products in the 90s. Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes. Super huge discount? retail stores opened, that you usually needed a membership card. Walmart started offering the cheapest sourced product from around the world that was often just slightly inferior to what you use to be able to get, or the price on the higher quality item went up while the slightly lower quality item price went down. Washing machines started using all these cheap plastic parts that more easily wear down or break. Electronics started to get added to everything whether it is needed or not, usually for switches where the electronic part is cheaper than the mechanical equivalent.
And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.
Well i mean yes shrinkflation is obviously a thing. But in this case... People are anyway eating too much sugar and processed food.
In the end it is like a sugar tax just that in this case the company itself did apply it and not the goverment.
I know people will buy it anyway also when its more expensive...
Just eat less processed food its harder to trick you and much more healthy.
I’d be more interested in the ingredients. I would guess the 91 version has a lot less weird stuff in it?
Mars bar is not food, it is basically packaged trash. It fits well the place where it was found.
If you fed a lion the average American diet, it would die. And red meat isn't really the problem.
Don't kill yourself. Dont eat trash.
The older I get the less I worry and even like downsizing on junk food even at a higher price.
And then we have the Freddo comparison [0] over here as well, not in skinkflation terms, but in a how is that going up in price terms (Although I've seen them at 39p recently, so probably out of date)
Since we are commenting in a tech website about chocolate bars, I'll say this. I bought one or more every day for years during my childhood from about 7 years old to 12 years old. Must have walked and rode my bike enough to stay fit. I also filled my lent box when I gave them up (Church donation, put the money you would spend on your daily fun into a box instead of spending it)
Shrinking portion sizes for junk food is probably the best thing we could do. Some 37% of Americans are obese. Back in the 40s and 50s, a normal amount of, say, Coca-Cola was a tiny-ass little bottle. Now you can get a half-gallon at the movies.
Article could have profited by adopting a neutral tone instead of attempting to be comedic. Surely information on historical sizes has not been lost. As for the candy bar market: the ideal outcome for the consumer would be if a single candy bar ended up being a reasonable portion size, priced proportionately to cost to produce.
I bought a gatorade today after a run and it was 28oz. Pretty certain the big ones were 32oz for decades. I probably think this is a better size for me but pretty clear that is not why the change was introduced.
Ironically you can barely find a single mars bar in the UK these days. Usually what's stocked is "Mars Duo": two mars bars in one wrapper.
TBH chocolate bar shouldn't be too large because you usually eat it as a whole. But chips, butter, chocolate etc. shouldn't be downsized. It's simply cheating
Gotta take making things away from the bean counters. Put product people back in charge, people who love what they make. "We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies." — Disney
A lot of my family worked at the Veghel, NL factory 60s to 90s (maybe some of them still do but I do not know); all got boxes of the stuff to take home. The shrinkflation started a long time ago, but, according to my old-uncles not as bad as it is now.
How can this be? I have been told all of my life that the market regulates itself and that is good for the consumer.
Seems like I see sizes go up and down.
Slow shrinkflation, then one day "now bigger!" (with a price increase) and then repeat.
Americans: we used get the Mars bar, but it's basically the Almond Snickers now
Summary "In accordance to our customer feedback we decreased the package size and increased the price. "
The business would like nothing better than you to buy nothing but hot air.
my childhood friend's grandparents were mars testers, their whole basement was full of mars bars!
I knew it!
I have vivid memories of eating a mars bar as a kid and marveling at the weight written on the packaging.
Same for KitKat Chunky.
I was already disgruntled with 62.5g! I remember when they were 65g.
I think a few years older and I would have remembered 68g Mars Bars.
Cheez-Its: 1 lb, down to 13.7 oz, then 12.4 oz, now 7 oz. 100% cheese product is now just salt, whey, yeast powder blend (they're allowed to call that cheese).
Check out the post from the family that has been counting Quality Street tin candies every year for the last decade or two... very telling.
I recall from my childhood in the 70s and 80s in the UK that there was a brief arms race in chocolate bar sizes. Mars Bars peaked at 68g IIRC.
Just like when the official kilogram ("Le Grand K") was losing weight!
This is a dumb/pointless headline + article imo. Its actually probably a GOOD thing that candy bars are smaller by default, for health reasons. What matters, and what the article fails to even mention, is the inflation-adjusted cost per gram. Not saying shrinkflation is not an issue, but this article does nothing at all to highlight it.
Let's just take a moment to appreciate the weasel who wrote this utter trash response. From the article:
> A Mars spokesperson said: "Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa."
Translation: "We think you're stupid enough to believe this nonsense, when the fact is, obviously we, as well as all our competitors, have been working over the past 25 years to trick our customers in order to increase profits."
I am curious how the composition of this chocolate bar has changed through the years .
I once read that Hershey has put a calories cap of 250 on a serving of their candy. That jives with what I see on the store shelves. I wonder if Mars did the same thing and perhaps the reduction in size was due (at least in part?) to that.
Like we hadn't noticed everything getting smaller and shittier. The stuff they sale look positively "cute" nowadays.
I hope that Costco continues to sell its $4.99 rotisserie chicken at loss of untold millions USD a year, I couldn't make it as good at 3x the price. I guess they make it up in volume :) Some things are still ok, but we are heading towards Soylent it seems.
It’s well known they grow at approximately half a gram a year.
More than 50% bigger. 62g vs 40g.
Has someone ever adjusted the Big Mac index to account for shrinkflation? Seems like that should definitely be a part of it.
I’ve tried a few college treats like Hot Pockets and found they are really terrible. I was a bit ashamed that I could have possibly enjoyed something that bad.
The upside of shrinkflation is that you actually may have had great taste, it was the product that declined. It’s not just the portion size, the ingredients and flavor profile are much worse.
Mars Bar from 1991 found
Is that some kind of achievement? Just look in the ads/coupons in the newspaper archive if you want to see the size of foods in the past.
In the United States, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks shrinkflation as part of the Consumer Price Index:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...
The real question was whether it is still edible 35y later :D
That said, perhaps it's better for American's health that they shrunk the size... assuming they didn't add 20g of sugar to it to compensate
Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.