Price Watch

Last updated May 2026

Same price, less product. It's not your imagination.

Between 2022 and 2026, dozens of major grocery brands reduced pack sizes by 5-20% while maintaining the same shelf price. Here's what shrinkflation looks like in practice, and how to spot it.

A Cadbury Dairy Milk block was 200g for decades. Now it is 180g, and the price went from $5.00 to $5.50. That is $2.50/100g to $3.06/100g. You are paying 22% more per gram, and the only way you would know is if you read the back of the pack. Pinch tracks real grocery prices at Coles, Woolworths, ALDI and Harris Farm, with 52 weeks of price history on 74,000+ products. But price is not the only thing that moves. Over the past four years, a growing number of everyday products have quietly gotten smaller while the number on the shelf tag stays the same, or goes up.

What is shrinkflation.

Shrinkflation is the practice of reducing the size, weight, or quantity of a product while keeping the price unchanged (or increasing it). The term combines "shrink" and "inflation" because the net effect is the same as a price rise: you pay the same amount and get less.

Unlike a straightforward price increase, which appears on the shelf ticket and is easy to notice, shrinkflation is much harder for shoppers to detect. The price looks familiar. The packaging often looks identical, or close to it. The change happens between production runs, and unless you are checking the fine print on the net weight, you are unlikely to notice.

The maths retailers hope you skip.

Most reporting treats size reductions and price increases as separate events. They are not. When they happen together, the effects compound.

Say a 200g product costs $5.00. The unit price is $2.50 per 100g. Now the manufacturer shrinks the pack to 180g (a 10% reduction) and raises the price to $5.25 (a 5% increase). Most people would guess that is roughly a 15% increase. It is not. The new unit price is $5.25 / 180g = $2.92 per 100g. That is a 16.7% increase per gram.

The formula is straightforward: divide the new price by the new size, divide the old price by the old size, then compare the two. The compounding happens because you are dividing a larger number by a smaller one. A 10% shrink plus a 5% price rise does not give you 15%. It gives you (1.05 / 0.90) - 1 = 16.7%. On a product you buy every week, that adds up fast.

Documented examples in Australia.

The following size reductions have been widely reported by consumer organisations and Australian media outlets including CHOICE, the ABC, and major news publishers. The "Effective increase" column accounts for both the size reduction and any price change. Products where the price also increased are marked in the "Price changed?" column.

The worst cases are products that shrink AND get a price increase at the same time. Cadbury Dairy Milk went from 200g at $5.00 to 180g at $5.50. That is $2.50/100g to $3.06/100g, a 22.2% increase per gram. Magnum 4-packs went from 440mL at $9.50 to 400mL at $10.00: $2.16/100mL to $2.50/100mL, or 15.8% more per serve.

Even without a price increase, the numbers add up. Tim Tams dropped from 200g to 175g at $4.50. The unit price moved from $2.25/100g to $2.57/100g. That is an extra $0.32 per 100g, or 14.3% more for the same biscuit.

What CHOICE found.

CHOICE, Australia's leading consumer advocacy organisation, has been tracking shrinkflation as an ongoing investigation. Between 2022 and 2024, CHOICE identified over 60 products that had been downsized across categories including chocolate, snacks, bread, ice cream, and household goods. Their reporting confirmed a consistent pattern: size reductions were not accompanied by any front-of-pack disclosure to consumers. In most cases the packaging was either unchanged or subtly redesigned, making visual detection nearly impossible.

The breadth of CHOICE's findings matters. This is not a handful of isolated cases. It is a widespread practice spanning multiple manufacturers and product categories, documented by an independent organisation with no commercial interest in the outcome.

What makes Australia different.

In 2024, the UK's Office for National Statistics began publishing a formal shrinkflation tracker, and the UK government introduced labelling requirements that compel manufacturers to disclose size changes on packaging. Australia has no equivalent requirement.

The PM's May 2025 announcement, "Cracking down on shrinkflation to help Australians save time and money," proposed mandatory front-of-pack size change notices, enhanced unit pricing standards, and extended ACCC enforcement powers. These reforms build on the ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry Final Report (February 2025), which identified shrinkflation as one of several practices that reduce price transparency for consumers.

As of May 2026, specific implementation timelines are still being finalised through Treasury consultation. The proposals are not yet law. Until they are, Australia has no mandatory disclosure requirement when a product shrinks. If you buy a block of chocolate that was 200g last month and 180g this month, no one is required to tell you.

Why it works.

Decades of consumer research show that shoppers are far more sensitive to price changes than to changes in quantity. A $1.00 price increase on a block of chocolate triggers attention. A 20g reduction in the same block, at the same price, generally does not. The packaging design stays familiar, the product sits in the same spot on the shelf, and the receipt looks the same.

Manufacturers understand this asymmetry. When input costs rise (raw ingredients, packaging, energy, transport), reducing pack size is often commercially preferable to raising the sticker price, because it generates less consumer pushback and less media scrutiny.

How to spot it.

The single most effective defence against shrinkflation is unit pricing: the per-100g, per-litre, or per-unit cost displayed on the shelf label alongside the total price. If a 200g product costs $5.00, the unit price is $2.50 per 100g. If the same product shrinks to 175g at $5.00, the unit price jumps to $2.86 per 100g, a 14.3% increase.

Practical steps:

• Always check the unit price, not just the shelf price. Compare per-100g or per-litre across brands and pack sizes.
• If the packaging says "new look," check the weight. Redesigns and downsizes frequently coincide. A new box design makes it harder to visually compare with the old pack, which is not a coincidence.
• Watch the net weight on the front or back of the packaging. If a product you buy regularly seems to have changed, check whether the grams have changed too.
• Compare across retailers and brands. ALDI's private-label sizes often have not changed when the branded equivalent has shrunk. If ALDI's version is still 200g and the name brand is now 180g, the unit price comparison will show you the difference immediately.
• Be suspicious of round-number price holds. When input costs are rising everywhere but a product stays at exactly $5.00, something else may have given. Check the weight.

What Pinch shows you.

Pinch tracks unit prices (per 100g, per litre) across Coles, Woolworths, ALDI and Harris Farm for every product. That means if a product shrinks at one retailer but not another, the unit price comparison surfaces the difference immediately. You do not need to remember what the old size was, or do the maths yourself.

Because Pinch stores 52 weeks of price history, you can also see whether a "new lower price" on a smaller pack is genuinely cheaper per gram than what you were paying before, or whether the unit cost actually went up. That context is the only reliable way to evaluate whether a size change is a genuine reformulation or a hidden price increase.

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