Sometimes gall must be admired. In the UK, Kraft Foods has announced that it is about to limit the size of its snack food portions because of ... expanding amounts of obesity. For the same reason, the company will eliminate marketing campaigns in schools. Forget the second part for a second and consider the first. For anyone who has partaken of snack foods, it has been easy to see the opposite of expansion - shrinkage.
There is nothing new about snack foods getting smaller. In fact, it's a long tradition. The comapnies have nudged down the the size of cakes and the amount of chips in a bag. And yet, for some reason, the prices don't equivalently scale back. Now there is a surprise - one might almost think that the food producer was trying to produce some additional profit.
The BBC story seems to accept the rationale until about two-thirds into the story, where the author notes that Kraft has declined to comment on price changes. How surprising. But they did assure products will be priced "competitively." It would have been nice thought, to explain the historic backward march of bulk.
9:36:32 AM 
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