Thursday, July 10, 2008

Pay Attention, Customers!

Check out the latest dirty trick the major food brands are doing to fool you into buying less for the same price. After reading this article, I did a little checking.

Why, those snakes in the grass!

The Hollywood freezer contains two packages of Breyer's ice cream. The older of the two is a 1.75 quarts (which was probably at one time half-gallon). The more recently purchased is 1.5 quarts - but the package has been cleverly designed to look exactly the same! The dimensions are identical - except that the smaller package is tapered toward the bottom.

The cads!

Maybe today's Latin expression should be "Caveat emptor!" ("Let the buyer beware!").

Better yet, "stick it to the man" by growing or making your own stuff.

4 comments:

Thursday's Child said...

Yep, you gotta watch the sneaky little things.

Jon Bakker said...

I noticed this too. No doubt it's driven by the bottom line. With prices of everything going through the roof to produce and ship most things, especially food, it means they took (at least) one of the avenues available to them. They could a) raise the price on the same product at the same volume, which would probably discourage customers; b) lower the quality of the product to reduce expenses; and/or c) repackage the product in a volume that makes for sustainable profit without changing the consumer cost. They did C for sure, and maybe B as well. The only way to find out is a taste test. Of course, I'm game! :-)

solarblogger said...

Isn't Breyers the brand of ice cream that doesn't melt? I don't trust ice cream that holds the same shape at room temperature. Homemade ice cream calls for real Cream, which is expensive. For special occasions, it's totally worth it. To compete in cost with store bought ice cream, though, I think gelato might be the way to go, since it uses milk instead of cream—and still manages to taste rich.

Rev. Larry Beane said...

Look for the manufacturers to pull out all the stops - no holds barred deception.

Breyers is actually very good, all natural ice cream (remember the commercials as the children were reading the ingredients of the competitors and trying to pronounce "polysorbate-80"?). But they're just being too deceptive. We've decided not to do business with them any more.

They also ticked me off because in Canada, Breyers is loaded with polysorbate-80 and all sorts of unpronounceable chemicals.

I'm shopping for a churn to make all natural ice cream (and yes, gelato!) myself.

If you want it done right, do it, make it, grow it, or power it yourself.