Cadbury angers world with shrinking chocolate bars

In the 1970s you could buy a chocolate bar from the friendly independent retailer on your local high street that was three metres long and cost less than one pence. That’s the sort of quaint story you’d get off someone who enjoys reminiscing about “the good old days”, anyway.

I am sure that living in permanent smog and without any electricity was absolutely superb, but Seventies sweets were also likely to be packed full of far more sugar, produced in less ethical conditions and about as vibrant as an undertaker’s top hat.

Very rarely will a company openly admit to shrinking the size of its product while maintaining (or, as is most often the case, increasing) the price, but Cadbury has taken a daring leap towards a brutal encounter with its customers by announcing just that. There have not yet been any reports of street warfare, but this surely cannot be far off.

Mondelez – the owner of the legendary Bourneville chocolatiers – has announced that all of the chocolate bars in the enormous range of Cadbury products sold in multipacks will be slimmed down by the end of 2021 to no more than two hundred calories each; prices, however, will remain the same. This includes favourites like Wispa, Crunchie and Twirl – as well as, hopefully, the dreaded Curly Wurly (can they be scaled down to nothing?)

This process of hacking off bits of the product without slashing the price is known as ‘shrinkflation’ and is often seen as a way of cutting costs. However, Louise Stigant, UK manufacturing director for Mondelez International, suggested that the reason for the cut backs was “tackling obesity” while “doing so without compromising on consumer choice.” This could be viewed as an unusual claim given that Cadbury bars sold individually will not be affected.

Seeming to confirm the views of the pessimistic population, Mark Jones, a food and drink expert at law firm Gordon’s, said: “Now we are on the brink of another recession, shrinkflation will probably increase again. Only this time, when the producers are caught, they are likely to point to the obesity epidemic as their motivation rather than their margins.”

Perhaps one way to prevent personal disappointment and stave off total fiscal collapse is to stock up on chocolate bars now before the nail files and sandpaper are brought out.