Food Packaging Sneaks and Cheats

While the size of packaging might not exactly seem immediately relevant in a book emphasizing nutrition and health, I'm in the opinion that it's plenty important. When you're purchasing air, the food dollar has been wasted.

Almost all of us have encountered the irritation, and disappointment, of discovering that a bag, jar, or box contained a smaller amount than we had been expecting. Sometimes we aren't really being shortchanged. There are functional reasons behind "slack fill" in packages, like protecting delicate and breakable contents during transport. But cutting quantity to avoid raising prices is often a time-honored tactic for manufacturers in tight economies. And in that one, too, many shoppers are noticing a trend toward stealthily shrinking package sizes. Deloitte's 2011 Consumer Food and Product Insight Survey found that nearly almost three-quarters of respondents (74 percent) repeat the size some packaged goods is smaller.

Packaging to Price

The practice of manipulating package design or size to disguise price increases is termed "packaging to price" and manufacturers increasingly becoming very clever at it. Here are just clear box packaging which they hope busy shoppers won't notice:

Changing the design with the package. Reducing the depth, however, not the width, of familiar boxes. From the aisle, everything looks a similar.

Distracting from smaller sizes with banners like "New E-Z pour bottle, " or "Same Great Taste." Describing new, but smaller, packaging as "greener," "future friendly," or with similar terms to suggest that it uses fewer resources in manufacture.

Packaging in larger containers, bags, or boxes to conceal product price hikes. The packages may say, "Now, 40% more!" But you're paying 50% more.

Adding more brine, syrup, or water to canned foods. Packaging in new, visually identical containers, but slightly lowering the content food. Here the "pound" of bacon suddenly weighs 15 ounces along with the "pint" of ice cream contains only 14 ounces.

Black Hole Tactics

While packaging to price may be defended because simple exercise of free market principles, some "black hole" tactics are especially deceitful. These include:

Adding dimples to the bottom of jars or molded packages Including useless partitioning inside packages, or bags inside packages Concealing pure emptiness, not evident at purchase, under bubble or blister packaging

Let the alarm bells disappear once you notice new packaging to get a familiar product. Be sure to look at the price label to find out if you're actually getting you suspect slack fill, go through the net weight in the product you're looking at and compare weights and box sizes of nearby products. To file a complaint, contact an FDA district complaint coordinator. A list of coordinators for every state can be found here.