What Do You Think Today?

[Avatar]

Haha, same in Egypt...everybody flat out ignores the no-smoking signs.

--A

[peter]

The Daily Mail must have been suffering a dearth of news stories on Saturday in the extreme. I can think of no other reason why they would devote four column inches to the reduction of weight of the 'Christmas Family Tub' of Quality Street chocolates from 820g to 780g [retailing at the same price as previously] which equated, they seriously informed us, to approximately five chocolates.

[aliantha]

Hey, c'mon. That's news you can use. Enquiring minds want to know. And so on.

[peter]

Actually, I was thinking about this and it seemed that there might be more to it than appears. The practice of slight product size reduction while keeping the same price is widespread across the retail sector as a whole and the confectioary sector in particular [if you think that your weekly choclate treat [;)] doesn't seem to hit the spot as much as it used to , that's because it doesn't - it's 5% smaller than it used to be].

So what was going on here. Was the Mail taking money from one of the competitor brands to run what in effect was a subliminal advertisement [-ve one] in the form of a bona fide news story; Would this even be legal? If all the big choc retailers are doing the same with their Christmas Family Tins [and they most likely are], why was this particular brand selected for the story and isn't the paper on pretty shakey legal ground printing it. After all, there is no contract between the producer and the consumer to sell a given weight of produce for a given price; they produce it and the consumer buys it [or doesn't] at the set price. Where is it the remit of a newspaper to involve itself in this process?

[ussusimiel]

I don't think there would be any legal issue, peter, so long as the facts are correct. Any decent news article worth its cocoa has to have an 'angle' or/and a 'hook'. Make it too factual and balanced and it becomes reportage which really only works for weighty stories (for this read 'bad news' ).

On the issue of the price of chocolate, I recently heard a similar story from a producer here in Ireland and it seems that costs have gone up in that area, so rather than increase prices the producers are reducing portions. And if you think about it this may not be a bad thing in relation to health, smaller portions = healthier eating. Look at the size of packets of crisps these days, they used to be a small cheap snack, now they are a significantly larger more expensive snack. The result is that we consume more of what is one of the most unhealthy food imaginable. Similarly, bars of chocolate, once we could only afford 50g max for a treat, now we buy them in much larger sizes, and as a result eat much more. Chocolate itself is not that much of a problem, it's the amount of sugar involved that is the real issue.

So, paradoxically, the reduction of product sizes is a good thing even if we are getting less value. I sometimes buy a product that is not as good value as I could get simply on health grounds, because I know I will eat less as a result. Did I mention that I'm a chocoholic!

u.

[Iolanthe]

All chocolate is smaller than when I was a child. Mars bars used to be a lot bigger than they are now. And they keep changing the names! What was wrong with Spangles? And Poppets?

[michaelm]

All chocolate is smaller than when I was a child. Mars bars used to be a lot bigger than they are now. And they keep changing the names! What was wrong with Spangles? And Poppets?

I seem to recall reading a few years ago that it is a myth that candy bars were bigger when we were kids, as sizes had actually increased over time. Not sure if they have shrunk at all recently though. I think this was in response to an argument at work in the early 80s when someone actually found (pre-Internet!) a history of the sizes of various candy bars and they had in general increased in size up until then.

Spangles...used to eat those as a kid. Pretty much 100% sugar, coloring and flavoring, but they were good.

[I'm Murrin]

The recent redesign of Dairy Milk (into the rounded shapes, from the old rectangles) was done in line with a reduction in the weight of the bar.

[aliantha]

Everything looked bigger when we were kids. Has anybody ever gone back to his/her elementary school after a few years?

peter, I doubt that any reporter would be stupid enough to fall for a release from Chocolate Maker A about how Chocolate Maker B is shorting customers by five candies in the family tin this Christmas. Pretty sure the assignment editor would see through that sort of tactic immediately. What's more likely to have happened is that a reporter looked at this year's tins and thought they looked smaller than last year's (or compared the weight on the new tin with the one Mum saved from last year because, y'know, those tins come in handy...) and decided to do a story on it. It would have been good if the reporter also had gone for a more global perspective, about how the price of chocolate is going up because of problems with the cocoa bean crop (which I believe is true -- drought or disease or something). I mean, that's what *I* would have done. I haven't seen the story so I don't know whether that info was included or not.

[peter]

Fair comment Ali - and this was the Mail, not the Telegraph .

Mmmm U. - I don't know. The actions of marketers are devious in the extreme; concurrent with the said decrease in size of your regular chocolate bar has been an across the board [ie in all convenience, discount, and supermarket points of sale] introduction of the £1 multipack, where 3 of the bars may be purchased at such a reduced unit price, that to buy the single bar is folly. They of course know, that you will eat the three bars as fast as you would eat two of the others [or faster!]. The 'own-brand' discounters like Aldi's and Lidel's have gone even further. You can buy 6 'Racer' bars [think Marathon] for 65 pence, and as there are only two wholesale chocolate producers in the country, they taste prety much identical to the real brands they copy [in fact Aldi's 'Titan' bar [think Mars] at 65pence for 6, are a distinct improvement on the original!].

[ussusimiel]

I wasn't trying to imply that (God forbid!) the chocolate manufacturers were doing anything in the interests of our health!. I was just pointing out that the reduction had the side-effect of being marginally better for our health.

It's exactly that kind of marketing and packaging of cheap cholocolate that I was talking about when I said that I sometimes deliberately choose to buy less than best value. Over the last number of years I have noticed that chocolate especially had become very cheap when you bought in in multiple packs or large sizes (way below what it used to be). The consequence for someone like me was that I found myself eating as much of it as I could ever want, which of course was way more than previously and far less healthy for me

The healthy choice became deciding how much should I eat and then buying only that amount, even if there was a pack right beside it where I could buy more but at a much cheaper rate (of course you always end up spending more than you intended that way, but that would be the whole point of the marketing, wouldn't it?).

I have no doubt that the chocolate producers have expanded their market significantly and that the consumer has benefited in terms of value, where we have obviously lost out is in terms of health. Sugar is the new fat in diet terms, and the consequences of its overconsumption on our health is beginning to be recognised as much more broad-ranging than was previously understood.

u.

[Frostheart Grueburn]

Huh? Is Squishy's cousin trolling on his account, or did I comprehend something wrong? O_o I thought I was the one with more caffeine and cocoa molecules in her bloodstream than hemoglobin. During both e-fests, people made multiple comments on my tendency to have Finnish chocolate in my backpack.

Now whatever actually happened to that Fazer blueberry chocolate??

[michaelm]

Got back home from 5 days away with low supplies in the pantry. However, I did remember that we overbought for Halloween, so still have a good supply of all sorts of candy...

[I'm Murrin]

Never really liked candy. I'm more of a chocolate man.

[michaelm]

Never really liked candy. I'm more of a chocolate man.

I meant the US definition, in which chocolate would be included in the definition of candy. Definitely have some, but unfortunately most of it is likely to be Hersheys...

[aliantha]

Hershey's kinda sucks, imho. Not that I wouldn't eat it if there were no other choice. ("Hi, I'm aliantha, and I'm a chocoholic....")

I'm seeing this smaller-amount-of-product-for-less trend for lots of treat-type foods -- not just chocolate. You can buy half-cup sized containers of ice cream here for a dollar apiece (although the price has gone up a bit for the premium brands lately). It's good for limiting yourself if you're on a diet -- and for knowing exactly how big a single serving is -- but you can buy a half-gallon-ish carton of Edy's for about half the cost of the same amount of ice cream in the single-serve containers. It's quite a racket.

[michaelm]

Yes, it's not good chocolate. I would much rather prefer European chocolate, but it's generally sold at extortionate prices here in the US

[Avatar]

I tend more toward the savoury myself. About the only sweet thing I eat is very dark chocolate.

--A

[peter]

Something like 45% of all student loans in the UK [payable for 'university' level courses only] will never be repayed, yet labour must be imported at high levels to 'make up for skill shortfalls' in the labour force. Concurrently more of our youth than ever before attend some post-school training and yet 20% plus 18-25 y.o.'s are unemployed.

Somewhere amongst this is evidence of a serious problem in the way in which we are organising further education in this country.

[I'm Murrin]

The way student loans are set up, particularly those taken out before the changes in the mid-2000s, is such that they're not actually expected to be fully repaid, so that's a separate isssue.