Shrinkflation is among the terms that have entered the vernacular of consumers across Canada as they’ve dealt with — and fairly questioned — an unreasonable surge in grocery prices and supermarket profits over the last few years. But which products have been impacted the most by the trend?
People have been taking to social media to share their sticker shock over basic staples, along with comparisons between different stores, areas and even countries. Some have even gone as far as developing apps or providing tips help their fellow shoppers save money on food in these trying economic times.
Along with sharp increases in the amount people have to spend at the cash register, some products have also decreased in size, and quite deceitfully so, with minimal changes to packaging plus the same or even higher pricing from the manufacturer and/or retailer.
It’s driven some customers to create lists of the worst offenders as far as products and stores, or to lose it over prices from just a few years ago — prices that one researcher has just delved deeper into.
Rachel Lee, a Toronto-based computer science student with a keen interest in food security, decided to analyze grocery store flyers from various chains between 2019 and 2024 to see which categories have seen the worst shrinkflation.
While her findings were not as damning as some may have expected, they did show many cases where items experienced both a decrease in volume and an uptick in prices over the timespan, sometimes by a substantial amount.
According to Lee’s analysis, six of 20 food classes experienced some shrinkflation, while five more saw significant shrinkflation.
The most extreme examples were Gogo Squeez fruit sauce pouches, which were reduced by 25% over the five years alongside a price hike; boxes of Janes chicken bites, which have dropped 21.1% in weight despite costing more; and Our Finest brand chocolate biscuits, which are higher in price in 2024 while also being 24% smaller.
Also up there was Great Value smoked ham (down 17.6%) and Crisco vegetable oil (16.9%).
The worst categories for shrinkflation, by Lee’s data, are higher sugar and/or higher fat foods (like prepackaged treats), which fell an average of 9.2% in size while going up in price between the years studied, as well as baby and toddler food (-8.3%), chicken (-7%), processed meats (-5.9%) and unsaturated fats and oils (-5.6%).
Saturated fats and oils, starchy vegetables, cheeses, condiments and sauces, red meats and yogurt, meanwhile, all saw moderate shrinkflation, with a reduction of 2.2 to 4.2% in package size for a larger price tag.
“Savvy consumers can easily be fooled by minor changes in package sizes and Statistics Canada does not track that. The data we collected can help shoppers pay more attention when making purchases in the sneakier categories,” Lee says.
She notes that shrinkflation is definitely not equal among food categories, and in many cases, the changes were “just enough to make them barely noticeable in a grocery cart.”
Though not every available product was included in the flyers examined, Lee writes that “there were enough cases to produce an unbiased dataset, covering all 20 Canada’s Food Guide groups, with examples within each group from Metro, No Frills and Walmart.”