FRESNO — Like many supermarket shoppers, Kristi Caviglia didn’t realize that lots of food products are shrinking.
Shopping at a Fresno Save Mart recently, she reached for a jar of Skippy Natural peanut butter. Her jar was 15 ounces, smaller than the other types of Skippy packed into 16.3-ounce jars. Both were on sale for $2.29 — making Skippy Natural more expensive than the others.
As costs of food and fuel rise, these companies face a choice: Slap higher price tags on their existing packages or shrink their boxes, jars, cartons and bags — and the amount of food inside — to stay at a lower price. Both methods force customers to spend more money for what they get, but the latter is less obvious.
A quick glance at mayonnaise jars, for example, didn’t reveal size differences at a Fresno Save Mart. But the labels show that Best Foods is sold in 30-ounce jars, slightly smaller than the standard 32-ounce (1-quart) containers.
Rising costs for food, manufacturing and transportation prompted Unilever, parent company of Best Foods, to change the size of mayonnaise jars, company spokesman Dean Mastrojohn wrote in an e-mail.
“We have chosen to reduce package sizes as one of our responses to these dramatic input cost increases.”
In the ice cream aisle, the 1.75-quart cartons are giving way to ones that contain 1.5 quarts.
Breyers still has both types of containers on grocery shelves; both were $4.99 last weekend.
In the juice section, gone are the 96-ounce jugs of Tropicana orange juice. Instead, their $5.59 replacements contain 89 ounces. To see what the old container looked like, go to mouseprint.org, a Web site devoted to “exposing the strings and catches buried in the fine print.”
The list goes on at consumerist.com, a Web site that posts examples of what it calls the “grocery shrink ray.” One of its Web pages features a picture of Cocoa Krispies, along with a link to an Associated Press story about Kellogg Co.’s smaller cereal boxes. In June, a Kellogg spokeswoman confirmed that Cocoa Krispies, Froot Loops, Corn Pops and other cereals now are sold in slightly smaller boxes.
There are other ways manufacturers change packaging, says Lee Perkins, president of Pacific Grain and Foods.
Bottoms of containers used to be flat, but many of them are now dimpled, he says. And ”some of them will switch to grams instead of ounces” on their labels, Perkins says.
Given these changes, what’s a cost-conscious shopper to do?
“Check different brands and their unit prices,” Perkins says. Be wary of sale prices. Because of different bag sizes, that bag of potato chips on sale for $3.25 may be more expensive per unit than the one selling for $3.95.
“Some of them will switch to grams instead of ounces” on their labels, Perkins says.
While shopping, he advises carrying a calculator. And if the changes seem like false advertising, call your local weights and measures agency.
A popular type of investigation involves “slack fill.” This occurs when a manufacturer uses a larger container than necessary to hold its product. If the contents of a jar, carton, box or bag seem even a little low, the local weights and measures office wants to know about it.
The same goes for blocks of ice cream that have large pockets of air inside.
