From Monday, Carrefour customers should see 13 by 13 centimeter posters appear on certain products, with this statement: “This product has seen its weight drop and the price charged by our supplier increase. We are committed to renegotiating this price.” This will include, among others, packets of Lays crisps (PepsiCo), bottles of Lipton Ice Tea (PepsiCo) which are now only 1.25 liters (instead of 1.5 liters previously), Amora mayonnaise (Unilever ) or Dolce Gusto Grande Intenso coffee pods (Nescafé).
This operation was announced on Wednesday September 6 by the CEO of the Carrefour group, Alexandre Bompard. Guest of the show C in the air on France 5, he strongly denounced shrinkflation, a marketing technique which consists of reducing the weight of an item, while increasing its selling price. Bompard cited as (bad) examples: “Our friends at Pepsi Cola, [qui] have chips called Lays, they’ve dropped them 15 grams, they’ve increased the number 30%. Our friends at Unilever, with the very pretty ice creams that we really like, the Magnum, the Carte d’or, it has fallen by 200 milliliters and is increasing by 20%. That’s shrinkflation.”
“Name and shame”
“Starting Monday, continued the director of Carrefour, I asked that in all stores, there be a label on all products on which we have shrinkflation, saying this product has seen its container reduced and its price increased. This way, we will have the most reliable information possible for consumers, because it is unacceptable to do that for the consumer.” Repeating the sequence on his X account (formerly Twitter), he promised that this marking will take place “on all products abusing shrinkflation”.
This type of “name and shame” initiative (the act of publicly denouncing that a person, group or company is acting wrongly) had already been carried out by the Intermarché group this summer. As noted by journalist Oliver Dauvers, a specialist in mass distribution, the supermarket chain had posted messages indicating that “Findus has decided to increase its prices while reducing the quantity of product. Our role is to offer you your favorite brands but also to alert you of these behaviors that are unfavorable to you.
“Abusive practices”
What criteria will Carrefour use to characterize “abuse”? Requested by CheckNewsthe group’s management explains that it does not have quantified criteria for the quantity or a percentage of price increase, and affirms that “the limit is when the product has not changed, the recipe has not changed, the packaging has not changed. So we cannot say that there are new costs, since the recipe is the same, the packaging is the same, the manufacturing costs are the same, but the weight has been reduced and the price has increased.
Changing the recipe or packaging, which will therefore make it possible to escape this “name and shame”, are arguments frequently put forward by manufacturers to justify these price increases. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Lemaire, had specifically targeted Kiri, denouncing the passage of “15 grams to 14 grams” (actually 20 g to 18 g) small square cheeses as an example of “abusive practices”. The Bel group reacted in a press release denouncing “false information regarding Kiri” and advancing “that the change in Kiri’s recipe in 2020 is in no way linked to the phenomenon of inflation, which came after it”.
This Carrefour initiative should be followed by a modification of the general rules, announced by Bruno Lemaire. The minister announced his desire to quickly impose “the obligation […] legal for manufacturers to indicate the change in content when the content has decreased and the price remains the same.