Cadbury owner's shrinking chocolate is Germany's biggest rip-off

Times

7 days ago

There were Pom-Bärs that boasted of containing 50 per cent less fat than regular crisps but failed to mention that they also had six times the sugar content.
There was the French drinking yoghurt that claimed to strengthen the body's defences against illness but was immunologically indistinguishable from regular yoghurt.
And then there was the boutique organic tomato sauce for children that had 240 per cent of the sugar found in its adult equivalent.
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The latest winner, however, of the 'Golden Windbag' award, conferred by German consumer rights activists on the 'most blatant advertising lie of the year', is the incredible vanishing chocolate bar.
Mondelez, the American processed food conglomerate behind brands such as Cadbury, Toblerone and Ritz biscuits, is the first company to receive the unwanted award for ' shrinkflation', the practice of furtively downsizing a product while maintaining or increasing its price.
Its Milka Alpine Milk bars, which are especially popular in Germany, have dwindled from 100g to 90g — but the price has risen from €1.49 to €1.99.
The brand is also sold in the UK
ALAMY
Foodwatch, the campaign group that runs the Golden Windbag award — the title is a pun on the German word windbeutel, which can also refer to a profiterole or a cream puff — calculated that this was equivalent to a 48 per cent stealth increase in the price per gram.
'Mondelez is tricking the people in the supermarket and making a pile of money in the process,' Chris Methmann, the director of Foodwatch, said. 'Shrinkflation is legalised consumer deception and the German government is leaving people to deal with it on their own.'
Mondelez has been contacted for comment. The company told Tagesschau, the national public broadcaster's flagship television news programme, that it had announced the change on its website and printed the new weight on the front of the packet. It said it had been obliged to take 'carefully considered measures' to deal with the soaring cost of cocoa, and inflation across its supply chain.
Shrinkflation has existed for decades but the term has come into vogue in recent years as manufacturers have been caught between rising input costs and shoppers with increasingly constrained budgets.
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Prominent cases have included Ben & Jerry's quietly scaling down its ice-cream tubs in Europe from 500ml to 465ml, while publicly denouncing its rivals for doing much the same in the US.
The practice has become especially common in the world of chocolate as the price of cocoa beans has fluctuated, and surged since the middle of 2023. An early example was Toblerone, which was forced to reverse its decision to skimp on chocolate by increasing the size of the gaps between the distinctive triangular peaks of its bars in 2016.