What is Short-Sizing?
When food manufacturers face price hikes in essential ingredients such as wheat, sugar or rice, they essentially have two methods for passing on these higher food costs to retailers and customers. One way is to increase the price of the current products, which might not be a popular choice with consumers, and the other way is to reduce the amount of product sold at the established retail price. This practice of shrinking packages in order to avoid raising prices is known as short-sizing. Short-sizing involves changing the package size of popular items such as breakfast cereal, ice cream, coffee and laundry detergents in order to avoid a substantial raise in retail prices. A traditional half-gallon container of ice cream, for example, may be redesigned to hold only 1 1/2 quarts of actual ice cream, although the dimensions of the carton may not change noticeably. The only outward sign of short-sizing a carton of ice cream may be a slightly slimmer profile when compared to an older carton
