Thing promised, thing due. This Monday, September 11, the supermarket brand Carrefour installed labels on its shelves to denounce certain products guilty of “shrinkflation”. A week earlier, the group’s CEO, Alexandre Bompard, announced that this practice of reducing the weight of an item, without lowering the price, or even increasing it, was “unacceptable” for the consumer (while acknowledging that Carrefour may have indulged in this practice itself in the past).
Ice cream, coffee and chips
The list sent to CheckNews on which the group’s merchandise and pricing teams have worked until Monday is made up of only 26 articles. It targets nine packets of ice cream (Viennetta, Côte d’or, Milka, Oreo, Daim, la Laitière), four boxes of coffee capsules, three Lipton Ice Tea drinks, three boxes of Lindt chocolates, two packets of Lay’s crisps , two Pliz cleaning sprays, a can of Guigoz baby milk powder, a jar of Amora mayonnaise, a can of Findus frozen fish. The affected suppliers are PepsiCo, Nestlé, Unilever, Froneri, Lindt and SC Johnson.
The price increases per kilogram listed by Carrefour range from 4.28% for Guigoz milk powder (from 900 grams to 830 grams) to 43.53% for Daim caramel-flavored ice cream sticks. The largest increases also concern Milka chocolate & vanilla ice cream (+43.39%) and bottles of Ice Tea which, by changing their format from 1.5 liters to 1.25 liters, saw an increase in their price. liter by more than 40%.
Magnum and Carte d’or missing from the list
Note that this small list of 26 products does not include certain products mentioned last week by Alexandre Bompard as examples of shrinkflation. On France 5, the CEO of the Carrefour group had announced the display operation by naming several products: “Our friends at Pepsi Cola, [qui] have chips called Lay’s, they lowered them by 15 grams, they increased the number by 30%. Our friends at Unilever, with the very pretty ice creams that we like very much, the Magnums, the Carte d’or, it has dropped by 200 milliliters and it has increased by 20%. That’s shrinkflation.”
However, although Lay’s chips appear in the list, this is not the case for any Magnum or Carte d’or ice cream reference. Joined by CheckNewsthe Carrefour group explains that “these references are currently the subject of renegotiations, on the occasion of a new entry on the shelves in November”. Concretely this means that the Carte d’Or and Magnum brands warned the supermarket chain that they were going to modify these products by reducing their size… and increasing the price per kilo. “These are offers that they are trying to pass on to us” sums up the group. The smaller ice creams denounced by Alexandre Bompard are therefore not (yet?) present on the shelves.
EDIT: updated at 5:15 p.m. on September 11 with addition of Carrefour’s reaction regarding Magnum and Carte d’or