At the market, many consumers say they're experiencing "shrinkflation" or "product downsizing" — the idea that food companies are covertly reducing the size of their products, while keeping prices the same.
But a new study finds that very few products actually meet that definition.
Instead new, smaller products are being introduced into the market to a similar effect.
"We're not calling it shrinkflation, because it's much broader than that," said Christian Rojas, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lead writer on the study soon to be published in the "International Journal of Industrial Organization."
It's important to make the distinction, Rojas said, so people can more accurately address the trends happening in the food industry broadly.
"In other words, we find that when we compute the average size of products, and it doesn't matter how you slice it, the average product is becoming smaller," he said.
Researchers found that between 2012 and 2019, the average size of packaged food decreased by nearly 15%. Those trends were more pronounced in sugary foods, and in states that had weaker per-unit pricing regulations.
But it was rare for a product to actually downsize — more often, smaller versions of that product were introduced alongside the original, larger version.
"So you could imagine an example of this," Rojas explained, "we have a 20 ounce Gatorade that remains in the market. And then there's a new version of Gatorade that's eight ounces, right?" So that's shrinkage, but it's not shrinkflation because the old product is still there."
Even with the change in definition, the trend of shrinkage can end up affecting consumer costs in the same way shrinkflation does. The new, smaller products can still be priced at levels where the consumer ends up paying more.
"People are worried that new packages are being introduced that are smaller and that are not reflecting price changes." Rojas said. "So I end up paying more per unit, or per ounce or whatever it is that you're dividing by. So the idea is the same."
A key point of interest in the study is how this wider trend of shrinkage impacted inflation measurements for that 7-year time period, and whether or not those measurements factored in the reduction in package size.
Researchers noted that price indexes didn't factor in smaller packages into their data ended up understating the level of food inflation by nearly 4%.
While the data doesn't provide a clear answer as to why products are shrinking, Rojas has some hypotheses.
One factor could be that consumers don't always pay close attention to the per-unit price of the products they buy, and some states don't make that information clear.
"The unit price laws that exist in the US are not homogeneous in all states," Rojas detailed. "Meaning some states mandate that supermarket retailers display the per-unit price on the shelf so that consumers can make easier comparisons to them buying or trying to decide between 24 napkins or 48 napkins packaged."
That shrinkage is more common in sugary foods could mean companies are responding to consumer preferences or even state- and federal-level regulation, like increased taxes.
The study found an acceleration in product shrinkage for sugary foods starting in 2015, when the first tax on sugar-sweetened beverages was enacted in California.
Rojas said it's not out of the question that companies are reducing food package size to recoup costs or increase profits, but they didn't test for that in their research.
He pointed to backlash against perceived shrinkflation from consumers as a reason for companies to avoid any sort of covert profit-seeking.