I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie
They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 99.6 ms ] thread> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.