Some grocery prices hold - because packages shrink

If you think the tuna salad looks skimpy in the bowl and the toilet paper roll comes up short on the holder, you’re not imagining things. All sorts of grocery products have shrunk.

A carton of Tropicana orange juice squeezed down from 64 ounces, a full half-gallon, to 59 ounces. A “pint” of Haagen-Dazs ice cream isn’t a pint anymore, but 14 ounces – 12.5 percent less. A large box of Kleenex dropped from 280 tissues to 260. A pound of coffee, 16 ounces, dropped 25 percent to 12 ounces, and some brands have started to slim that further, down to 11-ounce bags.

“You’re seeing it across the board,” said Ann Gurkin, a food, beverage and tobacco analyst for Davenport & Co. in Richmond.

“It’s one way to raise prices” that consumers don’t notice as much, she said. “You’ve seen both package changes and you’ve seen prices going up. I think it’s both.”

Manufacturers do this to combat rising costs, Gurkin said. They’re dealing with higher grain prices because of low harvests last year of corn, flour and soybeans – which go into baking products and snacks. They’re paying more for meat used for soups and frozen meals.

And, like the rest of the nation, they’re battling spikes in oil prices. Petroleum is used in packaging materials, and gasoline and diesel are required to transport goods.

The state Milk Commission, part of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, tracks the prices of 40 grocery items every month in Norfolk grocery stores. At least 11 have dwindled from the “standard” sizes previously used, Rodney Phillips, the commission’s administrator, wrote in an email.

Cans of tuna fell from 6.5 ounces to 5 ounces, according to the commission. Evaporated milk dipped from a 14.5-ounce can to 12 ounces.

The commission looks at the store brand for each item unless a private-label product is unavailable, said Vicki Ettare, a dairy auditor accountant for the commission.

It’s not a grocery item, but this newspaper has gotten smaller, too. The changes, though, were announced by the editor and the publisher.

During a buy-one-get-one sale on Air Wick fragrance spray cans at Harris Teeter last week, Alton Williams bought a couple for himself and extras for his granddaughters. Arriving home in Norfolk, he compared the new cans to a few older cans he still had. The old ones were 9 ounces; the new ones, 8 ounces. And the price had gone from about $1 in the past to $1.29, he noted.

“The size of the can is almost, to the naked eye, about the same,” he said. “They don’t want anyone to know that they’re cutting the amount that you’re getting for the same price.”

The wave of shrinkage started a few years ago, along with the recession and the last peak of gasoline prices.

Unilever U.S. Inc. cut a jar of Skippy peanut butter from 18 ounces to 16.3 ounces in the first quarter of 2008, wrote Dean Mastrojohn, a company spokesman in New Jersey, responding via email to questions. Unilever was facing rising commodity costs – the “same environment as today,” he wrote.

Haagen-Dazs shrank its pint of ice cream from 16 to 14 ounces in early 2009, said Diane McIntyre, a spokeswoman for parent company Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Inc. in Oakland, Calif. Its expenses for dairy products, eggs, vanilla, raspberries and other ingredients had risen by an average of 25 percent, she said.

“We just aren’t going to compromise in what we put into the ice cream in terms of quality,” McIntyre said.

The company didn’t want to pass on a higher price to consumers, she added. “The economy was really bad then, and we just didn’t think it was the time to ask them to pay more.”

This month, with many product materials still expensive or rising, Haagen-Dazs did boost prices. The 14-ounce ice cream rose from $4.39 to $4.69, McIntyre said.

Smaller packages are more palatable to consumers than price hikes, said Ken Bernhardt, a marketing professor at Georgia State University who specializes in consumer behavior. “It’s a lesser evil than having to pay more.”

The goal is to trim the package “to the point where it’s barely noticeable,” he said.

Back in 2008, PepsiCo Inc. hoped customers would notice that it bucked the trend and increased the bag size of its Lay’s potato chips, Gurkin said. Now, though, the Frito-Lay division of the company is preparing to downsize its snacks, she said.

“It’s a balancing act between your costs and your margins and maintaining consumer loyalty,” she said. “You don’t want to lose your core consumer.”

Some manufacturers – including Kraft Foods Inc., the parent company of Nabisco; Kellogg Co., which owns Keebler; and Kimberly-Clark Corp., which makes Kleenex – declined to respond to requests for information about their package sizes.

Often manufacturers drop the size in tandem, seemingly agreeing to a new standard package. Most brands of tuna, for example, have dropped to the 5-ounce cans.

In other categories, some manufacturers have held out with the old size. Jif boasts on its peanut butter jar, “We’re still 18 oz.” Minute Maid orange juice remains in a half-gallon carton. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is still a full pint.

That can make it tough to compare prices. Even within the same brands, product sizes can be inconsistent, possibly because the manufacturer is moving to smaller packages.

Starbucks, Caribou and Dunkin’ Donuts coffees come in 12-ounce bags. The Millstone brand sells its Breakfast Blend in a 12-ounce bag but has cut the size of its Colombian roast to 11 ounces. Both had the same price of $8.49 at Food Lion last week. Folgers Gourmet has done the same, moving some flavors down to an 11-ounce bag, for the same price.

In the cereal aisle, boxes of Post’s Great Grains – the Raisins, Dates & Pecans and Crunchy Pecans varieties – are 16 ounces. Next to those, the exact same size Great Grains box of Cranberry Almond Crunch has a slightly different design and reads, “New look, same great taste!” but holds only 13 ounces of the cereal. At Food Lion last week, the price on each of the boxes was the same: $3.99.

Few of the changes slip past Williams, 77, who said he pays close attention to every grocery price and size, especially since retiring fro his full-time job in 2007.

“I’m a very frugal, detail-oriented person,” he said. “I keep noticing these things because I look at the ounces and the date and measure what things cost per ounce, in different sizes and different brands, to get the most for my few pennies I have to spend.”

He recently saw that Coca-Cola Co. added a new size for its drinks: eight 12-ounce plastic bottles. The company already sells a 12-pack of 12-ounce cans – more cola at a lower price per can, he pointed out.

Some sizes, though, never change. A six-pack of beer? Still in 12-ounce cans. Still a six-pack.

Carolyn Shapiro, (757) 446-2270, carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com