The first thing I noticed was that I stopped finishing the chips. That probably does not sound like a particularly important economic indicator, but anyone who has known me for very long would understand why it caught my attention. I have always liked junk food, and chips in particular have been a lifelong weakness. I could buy a couple of bags on a Friday night, tear into them while playing video games, eat most of them that evening and polish off whatever remained the next morning. This was not an occasional behaviour. It was sufficiently consistent over enough decades that I knew what normal looked like.
Then, three or four years ago, something changed. I would open a bag, eat a few handfuls and enjoy them at first, but after a while something would put me off. It was not nausea exactly and nothing dramatic enough that I immediately declared the chips disgusting. I would simply stop eating them. I would wrap up the bag, go back to playing Xbox, try them again later and stop again. Then I would wake up the next morning and discover something almost unprecedented in my household: there were still chips left.
At first I thought perhaps I was finally developing some self-control. I had been trying to cut down on junk food for years, after all, so maybe this was progress. Then the kids started leaving their chips too, and that was when someone made the observation that stuck with me: “When kids don’t finish chips, there’s something wrong.” They were not making some principled stand against multinational snack-food corporations. They were not counting calories or suddenly becoming health-conscious. They just did not really want the chips.
Once I started noticing it, I started noticing it everywhere. Bread seemed different. Some of it appeared lighter, airier and less substantial than I remembered. Fast food that had been reliably enjoyable for decades became increasingly disappointing. Foods that I had ordered happily hundreds of times suddenly started producing experiences ranging from mediocre to occasionally unpleasant. Eventually we started buying bread from local bakers, and I began making some myself.
Meat produced an even more dramatic contrast. For years I was perfectly happy buying meat from grocery stores. Then I started buying from a local butcher and thought the improvement was substantial. Later, beginning around 2024, we began shopping regularly at our local farmers market and buying meat directly from farmers. One morning she cooked two batches of sausage, one from the butcher and one from a farmer, and the difference was remarkable. The farm sausage was so much better that the comparison made the butcher’s sausage seem significantly worse than I remembered it.
Part of that could simply be recalibration. Perhaps eating exceptionally good locally produced meat had moved my palate upward and made ordinary meat seem worse by comparison. That explanation is entirely possible, and I do not want to pretend that every change I have noticed can be traced to a single corporate decision. But the meat does not explain the chips. It does not explain the fast food. It does not explain the bread. And apparently I am far from the only person who has begun wondering what exactly has happened to our food.
There are now two useful words for parts of this phenomenon. The first is becoming familiar: shrinkflation. Shrinkflation occurs when the amount of product decreases while the price stays the same or increases. Statistics Canada examined eligible grocery products from 2021 through 2023 and found that 29.6 percent of those it tracked experienced shrinkflation, with nearly half of the quantity adjustments during that period occurring in 2022. (www150.statcan.gc.ca)
The second word is less familiar and, for what I have been observing, perhaps even more interesting: skimpflation. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada describes skimpflation as the use of less expensive, and potentially inferior, ingredients to manufacture what appears to be the same product. (ised-isde.canada.ca)
Suddenly I had language for two different suspicions I had been developing independently. We may be getting less of the product, and in some cases the product itself may be changing. Those are not the same problem, and neither should be confused with ordinary sticker-price inflation.
If something I buy for five dollars begins costing seven dollars, I can see what happened. I may not like it, but at least the transaction is comprehensible. Seven dollars is seven dollars. But suppose my five-dollar package also shrinks from 500 grams to 400 grams. The sticker price has risen 40 percent, yet the price per 100 grams has risen from one dollar to $1.75. In practical terms, I am paying 75 percent more for the same amount of product. Statistics Canada understands this distinction. When it detects a package-size reduction, it makes a quantity adjustment in the Consumer Price Index so that the smaller package is effectively treated as a price increase. (statcan.gc.ca)
That matters because it tells us that shrinkflation is not merely some grumpy consumer invention. It is a real form of inflation. But even that does not quite capture what the customer experiences, because what happens if I am simultaneously paying more, receiving less and enjoying the product less? Now things become harder to measure. I cannot responsibly declare that food has objectively quadrupled in price since 2020 merely because that is sometimes what the total degradation of the bargain feels like to me. Taste is not measured in grams. Enjoyment does not appear on a supermarket receipt. “Twenty percent less delicious” is not an economic unit.
Still, that does not make the experience imaginary. The customer does not experience inflation as an abstract number. The customer experiences the bargain: how much money did I give you, what did I receive, how much of it did I receive, and how good was it? Increasingly, my own experience has been that I am paying more money, receiving less product and, at least in some cases, enjoying the product less.
This became particularly visible around Halloween 2025. I began seeing people online complaining about Halloween candy. Portions seemed absurdly small, and there were jokes about children not even being particularly interested in eating some of it. Anecdotes like that prove very little by themselves, but the surrounding economics were real. Canadian reporting before Halloween 2025 described candy manufacturers dealing with extremely high cocoa prices by changing portion sizes, reducing chocolate content in some products, experimenting with alternative ingredients and reformulating products. (toronto.citynews.ca)
So when consumers said, “This doesn’t seem like the same candy,” at least some manufacturers really were responding to ingredient costs by changing things other than the sticker price. That does not mean every chocolate bar, bag of chips or loaf of bread that I have disliked was secretly reformulated. I do not need to prove that. The larger point is simply that changing the size, changing the ingredients and changing the price are all real strategies available to manufacturers, and consumers increasingly have to pay attention to all three.
This is where I begin to have a problem that goes beyond inflation. I do not necessarily object to a company changing a recipe. Change the recipe. I will taste it. If I like it, I will keep buying it. If I do not, I will not. That is a reasonably clean market transaction. What bothers me much more is the peculiar communication asymmetry surrounding shrinkflation.
We have all seen packages shouting “25% MORE!” or “BONUS SIZE!” or “33% EXTRA!” Apparently manufacturers have no philosophical objection to drawing our attention to changes in quantity. Quite the opposite. When the change makes the product look like a better bargain, quantity suddenly becomes extremely important information. It gets bright colours, starbursts and enormous lettering. It may become the most prominent message on the package.
When the direction reverses, however, something fascinating happens. Five hundred grams quietly becomes 425 grams. Twelve quietly becomes ten. A bottle acquires a slightly different curve. The cavity under a container becomes a little deeper. The box remains comfortingly familiar. The legally required quantity may still be printed on the package, so nobody necessarily tells an explicit lie, but nobody shouts “15% LESS!” either.
I think that distinction matters. When a change improves the apparent bargain, companies attract attention to it. When the change worsens the bargain, they generally do not. Canada’s own consumer-affairs material uses the term “undersizing” for reducing the amount of product by enough to matter but little enough to potentially escape a consumer’s notice. (ised-isde.canada.ca)
That is remarkably close to the part of this practice that bothers me. The issue is not simply that I am receiving less. It is that the transaction can preserve my old mental model of what I am buying for as long as possible. I still recognize the box, the brand and the rough price range, so I reach automatically. Only later do I discover that the bargain has changed.
If I were writing the rules, I would require companies that reduce the quantity of a product without proportionally reducing its price to display the reduction prominently for a period of time. If companies can proudly announce 25 percent more, they can survive admitting 15 percent less. When I first thought of this, I assumed I was proposing something fairly radical. Then I discovered France.
Since July 2024, large French retailers have been required under certain circumstances to notify customers when a product has shrunk while its unit price has increased. The notice identifies the old quantity, the new quantity and the resulting increase in unit price, and remains displayed near the product for two months. (presse.economie.gouv.fr)
That does not mean Canada should simply copy France. Countries are not interchangeable machines, and laws operate inside different cultures, markets and regulatory systems. Importing a rule from another country does not guarantee the same outcome. But laws in other places can still tell us something useful: it is possible for human beings to arrange things differently. The current arrangement is not a law of nature. Someone, somewhere, looked at shrinkflation and decided that quietly printing the new weight on the package was not enough and that consumers deserved to have the change pointed out. I find that reassuring.
Even transparency, however, is not ultimately what interests me most about all of this. I think something more valuable than the product itself is being reduced. The brand is shrinking too.
I have been interested in branding for years. I have listened to countless discussions of advertising and brand development, including many hours of Terry O’Reilly’s wonderful examinations of the subject, and one thing I have come to appreciate is just how powerful successful branding can be. Tim Hortons worked on me. McDonald’s worked on me. In fact, they worked almost perfectly.
I grew up loving them. McDonald’s was not merely hamburgers and fries. It became attached to going for drives, heading to the beach, family outings, movies, sporting events, treats, childhood excitement and eventually the wonderful adult realization that dinner could arrive in a paper bag and nobody had to cook or wash dishes. Tim Hortons became part of life in a similarly intimate way: coffee, road trips, stopping somewhere warm, Timbits, a snack because I was having a bad day, or a coffee because I was having a good one.
There was a period of my life when a medium coffee with two cream and a box of assorted Timbits could produce a ridiculous amount of pleasure for five or six dollars. Was it health food? Of course not. Did I occasionally eat more of it than was sensible? Absolutely. Did I love it? Yes, and I think that matters.
I do not want to write an essay pretending that I stood above these brands all along, immune to their advertising and sneering at people who ate fast food. Quite the opposite. I miss the food. I miss McDonald’s from the 1990s and early 2000s. I miss Tim Hortons from the 1990s and early 2000s. I even miss wanting it. If someone somehow opened a restaurant tomorrow that recreated certain foods exactly as I remember them from 1996, down to the ingredients, preparation, taste and overall experience, I suspect I would become a very enthusiastic customer.
That is how successful those brands were, and here is the strange part: they were so successful that even after years of increasingly disappointing experiences, I still occasionally feel the urge to go back. I can be driving somewhere and suddenly think about Tim Hortons or McDonald’s, and something old lights up. Every once in a while I go, and too often I am disappointed again.
That may be the most impressive demonstration of brand power imaginable. The current product is not always generating the desire anymore. The remembered product is. The company planted something in me decades ago that continues producing sales today.
This leads me to a definition of branding that I increasingly like: a brand is advertising that lives inside the person. The billboard disappears, the commercial ends, the childhood restaurant is demolished, the PlayPlace disappears and the packaging changes, but the feeling remains. That is brand equity at its most intimate.
If that is true, then I wonder whether some companies are currently making an extraordinary strategic mistake. They may be protecting margins while spending down the very asset that allows them to have margins in the first place. I have been thinking of this as brandflation. It is not an established economic term, just my own name for what I think I am watching. Shrinkflation removes some of the product. Skimpflation potentially removes some of the quality. Brandflation removes some of the accumulated meaning.
A company can probably do this slowly for quite a while without seeing the full consequence because customers like me are remarkably forgiving. We are carrying around decades of stored affection. I do not approach Tim Hortons as a new customer evaluating today’s offering from scratch. I arrive carrying thirty years of memories with me. That is an enormous competitive advantage, but it is not infinite.
I have watched my own behaviour change substantially. Six years ago I bought a tremendous amount of fast food and junk food. During the early pandemic years I used food-delivery services constantly. I ordered from restaurants all over town, and fast food was an ordinary part of my week. Today it is an occasional event. Sometimes I do not buy it at all for weeks. I buy almost no chips and much less processed junk food. We buy much of our meat directly from local farmers, visit farmers markets, buy bread from local bakers and sometimes bake our own.
This was not a consumer boycott. Nobody organized me, and I did not make some principled resolution to punish multinational food companies. I simply stopped wanting their products as much. If a strategy designed to increase the profit extracted from each purchase eventually reduces my purchases by something on the order of 90 percent, I am not convinced that I am the customer the company successfully optimized. It may have won the transaction while losing most of the future transactions.
Even that, however, may not be the biggest problem. I have had an unusual opportunity to watch brand formation across two generations of children. My biological children are now adults, while my stepchildren are much younger. When my biological children were little, we had the classic fast-food childhood experience. We liked the brands, they liked the brands, going through the drive-through could be exciting, and fast food became connected with family outings and treats. Those brands became part of childhood in much the same way they had become part of mine.
My stepchildren are having a different experience. They are the kids who stopped finishing the chips. They are growing up during the years when we repeatedly try old favourites and find ourselves disappointed. They hear us saying that something used to be better, that something tastes different, that a package looks strangely small or that we cannot understand why we bought a particular meal again.
They are forming associations too. Branding has not stopped working. The conditioning may simply be changing direction.
McDonald’s can still activate decades of warm associations in me because I have those decades. Tim Hortons can survive another mediocre visit from me because somewhere in my brain is a library containing thousands of previous positive encounters with Tim Hortons. A ten-year-old does not have that library.
This is where I think short-term optimization becomes dangerous. Imagine that tomorrow every one of these companies magically restored its products. No shrinkflation, no skimpflation, original recipes, original quantities, reasonable prices, everything wonderful again. I would probably respond quickly because the old brand is still there inside me waiting to be reactivated.
But a child who has spent formative years learning that the food is mediocre does not have an old brand to restore. For that child, mediocre may be the brand.
Twenty years from now, that child becomes the parent deciding where the family stops for lunch. This is the part I wonder whether quarterly financial statements can see. Companies can measure ingredient costs, labour costs, package sizes and units sold this quarter. They can calculate precisely how many cents are saved by reducing a portion by ten grams. What I am not sure they can easily put on a spreadsheet is the number of ten-year-olds who did not fall in love with them this year.
How much is that worth?
Branding is intergenerational. I took my children to places partly because my parents had taken me. They may take their children partly because I took them. A company that becomes embedded positively in childhood can inherit customers decades into the future. The reverse must also be possible. Repeated disappointment can become inherited too.
This is why I think shrinkflation and skimpflation can become much more than pricing strategies. They can become forms of corporate self-cannibalism. A company saves money by shaving something from the product, then something else, then something else. Perhaps each individual decision is defensible. Cocoa costs more. Labour costs more. Transportation costs more. Interest rates change. Shareholders expect returns. Competitors are doing the same thing.
I do not imagine executives sitting around a mahogany table twirling their moustaches and discussing how best to ruin my lunch. The pressures can be completely real. But emergent effects do not require villains. A hundred locally rational decisions can still produce one globally stupid outcome.
The outcome I see is that companies may be teaching customers not to trust them, and that may be the most damaging shrinkage of all. I used to pick up familiar products almost automatically. The brand reduced uncertainty. That is one of the great functions of a brand. I knew what Tim Hortons meant. I knew what McDonald’s meant. I knew what the bag of chips meant. I was not merely buying food. I was buying a predictable experience.
Now I increasingly inspect products with suspicion. Has this shrunk? Did this recipe change? Why does this package look strange? How much is actually in here? Is this going to taste the way it did last time? That is a remarkable reversal because a strong brand is supposed to reduce the mental work involved in making a purchase. These brands are now creating mental work.
Once I have learned to distrust the bargain, restoring the missing 50 grams someday does not necessarily restore the trust. That is the part I think short-term optimization misses. Trust accumulates slowly and can be spent quickly. Brand affection accumulates slowly and can be spent quickly. Habit accumulates slowly too, but it can be broken surprisingly quickly once disappointment becomes more reliable than pleasure.
The strange thing is that, personally, this story has worked out rather well for me. For most of my adult life I have tried to cut down on junk food. I have exercised consistently, understood nutrition reasonably well and known perfectly well that eating too much fast food, ice cream, chocolate and chips was not doing me any favours. The problem was always that those foods were delicious.
Apparently there was another solution.
Make them less delicious.
It worked beautifully.
I buy dramatically less junk food than I did a few years ago. I eat much less fast food. We eat more locally produced food. I bake bread. I buy meat from farmers. And, perhaps most amusingly, I can now wear everything in my closet. There is not some neglected section of clothing waiting for the day when I finally lose a few pounds. It all fits.
So perhaps I should finish with some gratitude. To every company that quietly made the package smaller, to every product reformulation I did not enjoy, to every fast-food meal that made me wonder why I had bothered and to every bag of chips that remained unfinished the next morning: thank you.
I spent decades trying to reduce my junk-food consumption.
You finally did it for me.
I am just not sure that was the brand strategy.
