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Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Cadbury’s sneaky 20% downsize

An angry chocolate lover explains how Cadbury have sneakily shrunk their 250g chocolate block to 200g — without changing the size of the packaging or the price.

Crikey readers have also been very fiery on the issue.

12 Comments

  1. Random-Thought
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 10:56 am | Permalink

    I’m pretty sure that Cadbury announced this a while ago and stated that the change was because of what the customers wanted.

  2. ranto
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 12:01 pm | Permalink

    Yes. I’m sure many customers said to Cadbury - we’d like to pay the same price for less chocolate. We love being ripped off by clever packaging redesign and “more contemporary block styling”.

  3. Ruth Brown
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 12:53 pm | Permalink

    Well, in fairness, the smaller block sizes are good for tight-arses who don’t like to share. Giving someone a couple of pieces is now a far smaller proportion of the total block.

  4. Christine Ashby
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 1:29 pm | Permalink

    What are all these outraged consumers doing buying Cadbury in the first place? Goes well with International Roast coffee, does it? It’s hard to feel much sympathy.

  5. Steven McKiernan
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 1:37 pm | Permalink

    Fat boy should stay away from chocolate and do more awesome gym time.

  6. Sam See
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 4:15 pm | Permalink

    Well done on reporting the sneaky Cadbury scam. Their more insidious trick was cutting down on the expensive cocoa content and changing Cadbury chocolate to Crapbury.
    I prefer to pay the extra for Lindt and Sprüngli, another good Aussie company (or not)!
    If you can be bothered investigate, Arnott’s, yet another Aussie company.

  7. Nicholas Faiz
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 4:45 pm | Permalink

    I’m not sure if this article is accurate, but there’s also the question of less cocoa content: http://westernpatriot.com.au/2009/06/cadbury-crisis-chocolate-now-just-a-cocoa-flavoured-confectionary-1781 .

  8. Scott Grant
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 5:02 pm | Permalink

    When I first noticed this, I thought I would switch to Nestle chocolate and never buy Cadbury again. Guess what! Nestle did the same thing at around the same time as Cadbury! I also noticed that around the time of the Cadbury and Nestle changes, that Woolworths stopped stocking their house brand (Woolworths Select) chocolate. Now there’s consumer choice for you! I have stopped buying Cadbury AND Nestle chocolates.

    These days I mostly buy Whittakers’s, the Coles house brand (I forget the name) and the Aldi house brand (I forget the name). All report a higher percentage of “cocoa solids” which, I think, bears some relationship to quality. While Lindt and others are nicer chocolates, I get annoyed at the small blocks they offer, and I find the prices hard to justify as an “impulse” buy.

  9. Scott Grant
    Posted Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 5:10 pm | Permalink

    BTW,

    I also noticed on the Cadbury wrapping that they no longer list their address as “Claremont, Tasmania’. Have they set up a chocolate factory in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, perchance?

  10. Simon Doyle
    Posted Wednesday, 22 July 2009 at 11:22 am | Permalink

    Have been buying Aldi’s ‘Choceur’ chocolate for some years now. Their block is 300 gram for the same price or less. And it’s good chocolate which comes from Austria, I read in the fine print. So that’s another option for discontented Cadbury addicts.

  11. mickjpc
    Posted Wednesday, 22 July 2009 at 7:00 pm | Permalink

    Forget about the high-fives in the Cadbury marketing dept, ask Cadbury Australia why they have failed to fall in line with Cadbury UK and start using fair-trade or similarly sourced cocoa. The real rip-off is westerners eating chocky made with the sweat and deprivation of child slavery. Although, maybe this is what the customers want???

  12. AnaM
    Posted Thursday, 23 July 2009 at 6:29 pm | Permalink

    I don’t mind the packaging, but the excuses used by the company are hilarious. It’s always about the ‘obesity epidemic’ to them, saying that reducing the content will round off the calorie count, which is utter rubbish, just another ploy for a multinational to reap more profits at the expense of the consumer.
    Also, it took this long to realise that child/slave labour is used to harvest cacao beans? Some form of slave labor and/or exploitation has been used ever since the Spanish made the rest of the world chocolate-aware. That’s nothing new. Workers in China are also experiencing similar issues that workers in England experienced during the Industrial Revolution; living in dorms, working 7 days a week. Now that’s slave labour and we all accept it for everything, right down to our smalls. So what’s a chocolate bar?