To keep up with rising costs, manufacturers are using packaging to keep prices of some foods and other products from going up. Recently, Unilever started putting Skippy peanut butter in a plastic jar that has a "dimple" in the bottom. The jar looks the same on the shelf, but contains about 10 percent less peanut butter. Other strategies of cost containment include narrowing the width of toilet paper, trimming the bar of soap and shrinking the size of ice cream containers. Nestle, producer of Dreyer's and Edy's ice cream, discovered that "customers are not ready to pay $7.00 or more for a carton of ice cream." Their solution to the increased cost of milk, cocoa, sweeteners and energy, is to reduce the size of the carton from 1.75 quarts to 1.5 quarts. What's a consumer to do? "The only way to know you are buying less is to look at the weight on the label and recognize it's lighter than before."
Source: www.latimes.com
