Have you actually looked at what a five-rupee packet of Parle-G weighs these days?

I hadn’t, until this World Cup. I’ve been watching FIFA 2026 on ZEE5, and somewhere around the third match it hit me that I was watching more ads than football. Ads in the pre-roll, ads at half-time, ads stitched into the highlights, and then, in the middle of play, the broadcast cuts away for the hydration break and there’s an ad there too. The players are standing around gulping water and I’m being sold a biscuit.

And here’s the part that made me sit up. The hydration break isn’t just a gap they fill with ads. It’s a sponsored slot with a brand name on it. Coca-Cola’s own press release calls them “official Powerade Hydration Breaks.”¹ Powerade is a Coca-Cola product. So the break exists partly to keep players safe in the North American summer heat, sure, but it’s also a piece of inventory, sold. One analyst reckoned the two breaks across 104 matches could hand broadcasters something in the range of half a billion dollars in fresh ad time, priced like the most-watched events on earth.²³

So you’ve got Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelez and friends buying up every square inch of the biggest tournament in the world. Lay’s is an official FIFA World Cup sponsor.⁴ Coca-Cola has been a FIFA partner for nearly fifty years.⁵ And on the Indian feed, the brands lining up to advertise include Mondelez, the people who make Cadbury.⁶

The same brands. The same Cadbury, the same Lay’s, the same biscuits. And every one of those products has been quietly getting smaller.

The pack in your hand

To be honest, this is the thing I actually notice, more than any price tag. The Parle-G glucose biscuit that costs five rupees started life at around 100 grams. It’s now somewhere around 55.⁷ Parle’s own category head put it plainly a couple of years ago: for the five-rupee range, what used to be 100 grams “is now accessible in roughly half the amount,” and on that SKU they barely break even.⁸ The ten-rupee Parle-G went from 140 grams to 110 in a single year.⁹

It’s everywhere once you start looking. The Vim dishwashing bar dropped from 155 grams to 135.¹⁰ Haldiram’s ten-rupee aloo bhujia went from 55 grams to 42.¹⁰ And it hasn’t stopped: as recently as this year Nestlé trimmed Maggi packs by up to nine per cent, the seven-rupee pack from 35 grams to 32, the twelve-rupee one from 52 to 48, the price sitting exactly where it was.¹¹

Notice what’s constant in all of these. The price. Five rupees, ten rupees, twelve rupees. The number on the pack never moves. The grams inside do.

That’s not an accident, and it’s not laziness. In India the price point is the product. Those five- and ten-rupee packs, the ones the industry calls low-unit packs, are a huge chunk of how fast-moving consumer goods actually sell here. The five-rupee point alone is around a third of FMCG volumes by one Kantar read; Hindustan Unilever has said close to 30 per cent of its business runs through these “magic price point” packs.¹²¹³ A five-rupee coin buys a sachet of shampoo, a strip of biscuits, a bar of soap. Move that to five-fifty and the whole thing breaks, because nobody’s carrying a fifty-paise coin and the kirana math stops being instant. So when costs go up, and in 2022 they went up hard on palm oil and wheat and fuel, the price stays nailed to the coin and the pack shrinks to absorb it.

The companies don’t even hide it, which surprised me. Dabur’s spokesperson told the Associated Press, flatly, “My company has been doing it openly for ages.”¹⁴ Another Dabur executive talked about “grammage reduction to protect sacred price points like Re 1, Rs 5, and Rs 10.”¹⁵ Britannia said it passed on about 65 per cent of its rising costs through weight cuts rather than price hikes.¹⁰ NielsenIQ, looking at the whole market, saw units growing while volume shrank, which is the statistical shadow of exactly this: more packs sold, less stuff in each.¹⁶

Why shave the grams instead of moving the price?

This is the bit I find genuinely interesting, because the answer is about us, not about them.

We are much more sensitive to a price going up than to a pack getting smaller. Not a little more. A lot. When economists dug into scanner data from the ice cream aisle, the demand response to a package shrinking was about a quarter of the response to an equivalent price rise.¹⁷ A more recent study across four million products found the same lopsidedness: after a downsizing, the price per unit effectively jumps, but sales actually rise in the following year, because shoppers don’t clock it.¹⁸ And this isn’t a new discovery dressed up with a new word. Marketing researchers found the same thing back in 1972, half a century before “shrinkflation” was in anybody’s mouth.¹⁹

So the firm faces a choice. Raise the price and watch people flinch and switch to a competitor. Or shave the grams and watch almost nobody notice. Put like that, it’s not even a hard call. It’s the rational move.

There’s a second reason the price is so sticky, and it’s my favourite bit of trivia in all of this. Coca-Cola sold a bottle of Coke for five cents for seventy-three years, from 1886 to 1959.²⁰ Seventy-three years at one nominal price. Part of the reason was mundane and physical: the vending machines took a single coin, and the company was locked into a bottling contract. At one point Coca-Cola literally lobbied the US Treasury to mint a 7.5-cent coin so it could nudge the price without breaking the machine.²⁰ That’s the same logic as the five-rupee packet. The price point is a piece of infrastructure. It’s easier to change the product than the coin.

And there’s a psychological tax on crossing a round number, too. People react to a one-cent increase over a 99-ending price as if it were more than twenty cents.²¹ Crossing five rupees to six feels like a much bigger jump than the grams quietly falling from 55 to 50. Hershey worked this out a century ago, before any of the research existed: it kept its chocolate bar at a nickel from 1900 to 1969 and simply changed the weight of the bar as cocoa prices rose and fell.²² Shrinkflation, basically, before it had a name. The word itself is newer and messier than people think. It’s generally credited to the economist Pippa Malmgren in the mid-2010s, though the practice, as we’ve seen, is ancient.²³

Here’s the catch, though, and it’s the reason companies can’t be too smug about this. The moment people do notice, they judge a shrink as more unfair than a straight price rise. Across five preregistered experiments, shoppers who accepted a cost-driven price increase as fair turned resentful when the same increase was smuggled in as a size cut.²⁴ Which is why so much energy goes into making sure you don’t notice. And which is why a president once made a video about it. More on that in a minute.

”But isn’t this hidden inflation the government misses?”

This is the line I keep hearing, and I believed it too, and it turns out to be basically wrong.

The intuition is that the packet shrinks, the price holds, so the official inflation number sails on none the wiser. But think about how a statistics agency actually measures a price. It doesn’t record “five rupees.” It records the price per gram. And if the grams fall while the rupees don’t, the price per gram goes up, and that increase lands in the index. Shrinkflation isn’t invisible to inflation stats. It’s one of the things they’re specifically built to catch.

I went and checked, because I didn’t believe it either, and every major statistics agency I looked at does exactly this. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics computes an “effective price per standard size,” usually per ounce, and its own worked example is a tub of ice cream going from 64 ounces to 60 at the same price, which it records as a 6.7 per cent price increase.²⁵ It does the same for toilet paper: drop from 220 sheets to 200 and that’s logged as a 10 per cent rise per sheet.²⁵ Britain’s ONS calls it, drily, “quantity adjustment.”²⁶ France’s INSEE runs the identical maths with a shrinking cookie packet as its example.²⁷ Canada, Australia, Japan, all the same.²⁸²⁹³⁰ Japan is worth calling out because everyone assumes its long deflation hid this stuff, but the Japanese agency explicitly treats a jam jar going from 165 grams to 150 as a real price increase.³⁰

So how big is the effect, once you actually measure it? Small, in aggregate, and that’s the honest part. The US Government Accountability Office found downsizing added about 0.06 percentage points to a cumulative 34.5 per cent rise in prices from 2019 to 2024.³¹ Rounding error, nationally. But zoom into the aisles where it happens and it’s real: over that stretch, downsizing added around 3 percentage points to household paper products, 2.6 to snacks, and a couple to sweets and cereal.³¹ The UK’s ONS found no meaningful effect on the overall index but a clear 1.22-point bump on the sugar-and-chocolate category.³² It’s a category story, not a macro one.

And there’s a wrinkle that cuts the other way, which I think the angry version of this argument tends to skip. A lot of what looks like shrinkflation on the shelf is actually product turnover: companies quietly launching a new, smaller SKU next to the old one rather than shrinking a pack you already know. One study found average package sizes fell almost 15 per cent, but mostly through this churn, not through the classic same-pack shrink everyone pictures.³³ The truth is messier than “they shrank your biscuit behind your back.”

Where the statisticians do genuinely lose the thread is quality. If the sheet count holds but the sheet gets thinner, or the chocolate keeps its weight but swaps cocoa butter for palm oil, that’s a different beast, sometimes called skimpflation, and it’s much harder to measure because it’s about quality, not quantity.³⁴ The grams are countable. The cheapening isn’t. That’s the part the index quietly misses, not the shrinking packet everyone worries about.

Which brings me to the bit that’s almost funny. India does have a rule aimed squarely at this. Since the start of 2024, packaged goods have to print a unit price, rupees per gram or per kilo, right next to the MRP, so you can compare across sizes.³⁵ Good rule. Except, as far as I can tell reading it, the requirement carves out the smallest packs, the ones below a certain size and price. Which is to say: it exempts the five- and ten-rupee packs where the whole shrinking game is actually played.³⁶ The one place you’d most want the per-gram number is the one place you don’t get it. (I’d genuinely like to be wrong about this one, so treat it as my reading of the rule rather than gospel.) Meanwhile, in a small sign the government has noticed the wider problem, it just went the other way on cooking oil this year and re-imposed standard pack sizes, precisely because the free-for-all had produced weird 810-gram and 900-gram bottles that made comparison impossible.³⁷

The stadium and the shelf

Come back to the World Cup, because this is where the two halves snap together.

The very brands paying a fortune to own the tournament are the ones trimming the grams. PepsiCo spent around 3.8 billion dollars on advertising in 2023 alone; Coca-Cola, about five billion.³⁸³⁹ PepsiCo pays a reported 70-odd million dollars a year just to be a UEFA Champions League sponsor, and its “No Lay’s, No Game” campaign has Messi and Beckham and Henry mugging for the camera about how you can’t watch football without the chips.⁴⁰⁴¹ And those chips? The party bag of Doritos in the US went from 9.75 ounces to 9.25, about five fewer chips, at the same $4.29. Frito-Lay confirmed it: “we took just a little bit out of the bag.”⁴² Gatorade’s 32-ounce bottle became a 28-ounce bottle with a fetching new “ergonomic” waist, same price.⁴² Cadbury’s Dairy Milk sharing bar in the UK went from 200 grams to 180.⁴³

The West got its own theatrical version of this. On Super Bowl Sunday in 2024, the President of the United States put out a video grumbling about “shrinkflation,” pointing at smaller sports-drink bottles and emptier chip bags, calling it “a rip-off.”⁴⁴ It panned across a Doritos bag, among others. Hours later, during the same Super Bowl, Doritos ran its first-ever in-game Dinamita ad, in a slot that cost around seven million dollars for thirty seconds.⁴⁵⁴⁶ The complaint and the advertisement, same brand, same broadcast, same night. You couldn’t script it better.

Governments have started swinging at this, unevenly. France now forces big supermarkets to slap a notice on products that shrank while the per-unit price rose, with fines for not doing it.⁴⁷ South Korea made undisclosed downsizing a punishable unfair-trade practice.⁴⁸ Hungary, Romania, Italy, Austria have all passed or are passing their own versions.⁴⁹ The US bills, the ones the President was backing, quietly died in Congress and nothing replaced them.⁵⁰ The tool everyone reaches for is the same: not banning the shrink, just forcing it into the open, because sunlight is the one thing the strategy can’t survive. Remember the research: people accept the cost story until they see the trick.

So what is this, really?

Not a scam, exactly. Nothing here is illegal. The cocoa harvests really did fail; palm oil really did spike. The companies are making a rational choice against a real constraint, and honestly, given how much more we punish a price rise than a shrink, I’m not sure I’d do differently in their chair.

The most honest voice in the whole story might be the Mondelez CEO, who this year just said the quiet part out loud. Asked about shrinking chocolate bars, he said: “It’s not like we’re trying to fool the consumer in any way,” and argued that shoppers simply “don’t want to then pay one and a half or two pounds for the same quantity.”⁵¹ He’s not wrong. That’s the deal we’ve implicitly struck. We told them, through a million tiny purchasing decisions, that we’d rather not see the price move, and they took us at our word and moved the grams instead.

Which is why the fix isn’t really regulation, or not only. It’s the thing I did by accident, sitting in front of the World Cup, half-watching an ad for a biscuit during a hydration break named after a soft drink. Turn the packet over. Look at the grams. That number, the one nobody’s forcing onto the front of the small packs, is the only one that was ever telling the truth.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ll un-see it now. Ah well.

References

Footnotes

1. POWERADE’s ‘Power Your Legacy’ Campaign for FIFA World Cup 2026 (The Coca-Cola Company) ↩

2. Are World Cup hydration breaks actually commercial breaks or momentum breaks? (ESPN, June 2026) ↩

3. World Cup Cooling Breaks: A $600 Million TV Business (Rio Times, July 2026): estimate attributed to Workweek analysis. ↩

4. Lay’s named Official Sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26 & FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 (FIFA, Sept 2024) ↩

5. The Coca-Cola Company and FIFA World Cup 2026 ↩

6. Big reach, selective spends: How FIFA advertising is shaping up in India (Storyboard18, July 2026) ↩

7. How inflation is shrinking Low-Unit-Packs (FFOODS Spectrum, Feb 2023): Parle-G ₹5 pack tracked from ~100g down to ~55g; current 55g corroborated by retail listings. ↩

8. Why are FMCG firms unable to decrease sachets despite rising inflation (May 2022): Parle’s Mayank Shah on the ₹5 pack now being “roughly half” of 100g and barely breaking even. ↩

9. You’re not imagining it, Maggi to Vim bar, FMCGs are getting smaller (ThePrint, May 2022) ↩

10. Shrinkflation Hits India’s Snacks as Firms Struggle With Costs (Bloomberg via ThePrint, May 2022): Vim 155g→135g, Haldiram’s aloo bhujia 55g→42g, Britannia’s ~65% cost pass-through via weight. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Nestle reduces Maggi pack sizes by up to 9% amid cost pressures (Bizzbuzz, June 2026) ↩

12. Mini packs, major dilemmas: FMCGs tackle shrinking margins (Business Standard, Nov 2024): Kantar price-point volume shares (₹5 ≈ a third of FMCG volumes). ↩

13. Magic prices did warn of India’s sticky inflation (Andy Mukherjee, Bloomberg Opinion, via ThePrint, May 2022): HUL’s ~30% of business from magic price-point packs. ↩

14. Shrinkflation: Companies shrinking package sizes without lowering prices (AP via Business Today, June 2022): Dabur’s Byas Anand: “doing it openly for ages.” ↩

15. Inflation impact: FMCG firms go for grammage cut, bridge packs (PTI via Free Press Journal, May 2022): Dabur on protecting “sacred price points.” ↩

16. FMCG in India continues to recover with double-digit growth in Q2 2022 (NielsenIQ, Sept 2022): grammage drop for same-price packs; unit growth outpacing volume. ↩

17. Consumer Response to Package Downsizing: Evidence from the Chicago Ice Cream Market (Çakır & Balagtas, Journal of Retailing, 2014): size elasticity roughly a quarter of price elasticity. ↩

18. Shrinkflation and Consumer Demand (Janssen & Kasinger, Marketing Science, 2026): NielsenIQ scanner data on ~4M products; sales rise after downsizing despite higher per-unit price. ↩

19. Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Package Size and Price (Granger & Billson, Journal of Marketing Research, 1972) ↩

20. “The Real Thing”: Nominal Price Rigidity of the Nickel Coke, 1886–1959 (Levy & Young, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2004) ↩ ↩²

21. More Than a Penny’s Worth: Left-Digit Bias and Firm Pricing (Strulov-Shlain, Review of Economic Studies, 2023) ↩

22. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate: Bar Wrappers Over the Years (Hershey Community Archives): nickel bar 1900–1969, weight varied with cocoa prices. ↩

23. “Shrinkflation”: meaning and origin (Word Histories): modern sense generally credited to Pippa Malmgren; earlier isolated uses in other senses. ↩

24. Frontiers: Shrinkflation Aversion (Evangelidis, Marketing Science, 2024): five preregistered experiments; size cuts judged more unfair than equivalent price rises. ↩

25. Getting less for the same price? How the CPI measures “shrinkflation” (BLS Beyond the Numbers, 2023): effective price per ounce; ice-cream 64→60oz = +6.7%; toilet paper 220→200 sheets = +10%. ↩ ↩²

26. Consumer price inflation (CPIH, CPI, RPI) QMI (UK Office for National Statistics): “quantity adjustment” for permanent size changes. ↩

27. Comment l’Insee mesure-t-il le juste prix? (INSEE, Dec 2023): worked cookie example, price corrected for change in content. ↩

28. Measuring pure price change: Exploring Shrinkflation in the CPI (Statistics Canada, Dec 2023) ↩

29. Quality change in the Australian CPI (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Dec 2019): 750→675ml at same price recorded as a 10% rise. ↩

30. 消費者物価指数に関するQ&A (Japan Statistics Bureau): jam 165g→150g treated as a real price increase; snacks/juice/detergent priced per 100g/1000mL. ↩ ↩²

31. Consumer Prices: Trends and Policy Options Related to Shrinking Product Sizes (US GAO, GAO-25-107451, July 2025): downsizing ~0.06pp of a 34.5% cumulative rise 2019–2024; category effects for paper, snacks, sweets, cereal. ↩ ↩²

32. Shrinkflation and the changing cost of chocolate (UK ONS, July 2017): +1.22pp on the sugar/jam/chocolate/confectionery category. ↩

33. How Package Size Changes Affect Food Inflation: Evidence from Scanner Data (Rojas, Jaenicke & Page, 2026): average pack size fell ~14.6%, mostly via new-product turnover rather than same-SKU shrinking. ↩

34. Beyond Inflation Numbers: Shrinkflation and Skimpflation (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Page One Economics, Dec 2022): quality cheapening is much harder to measure than quantity. ↩

35. Unit sale price to be declared on packaged items from Jan 1 (Legal Metrology Packaged Commodities Amendment, effective 2024-01-01) ↩

36. FAQs on Unit Sale Price under the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules: smallest packs (below the size/MRP threshold) exempted from the unit-price declaration. Reading of a practitioner summary; to be confirmed against the gazette. ↩

37. Centre introduces standard pack sizes for edible oils (NewsOnAir / Government of India, June 2026) ↩

38. PepsiCo Form 10-K, FY2023 (SEC EDGAR): advertising expenses of $3.8 billion in 2023. ↩

39. The Coca-Cola Company Form 10-K, FY2023 (SEC EDGAR): advertising expenses of about $5.0 billion in 2023. ↩

40. PepsiCo and UEFA in exclusive 2027-33 cycle negotiations (Sportcal / GlobalData, Dec 2025): ~$70m/year valuation (industry estimate). ↩

41. Lay’s debuts “Messi Visits” for its football campaign (PepsiCo, March 2023) ↩

42. Not Your Imagination: Doritos Bag Has 5 Fewer Chips Due To “Shrinkflation” (Newsweek, March 2022): Doritos 9.75→9.25oz at $4.29 (Frito-Lay confirmed); Gatorade 32→28oz. ↩ ↩²

43. Cadbury Dairy Milk bars slashed in size as chocolate costs spiral (ConfectioneryNews, March 2022): UK sharing bar 200g→180g at the same price. ↩

44. President Biden slams “shrinkflation” in Super Bowl Sunday video (Fox Business, Feb 2024) ↩

45. First-Ever Doritos Dinamita In-Game Commercial at Super Bowl LVIII (PepsiCo, Feb 2024) ↩

46. 2024 Super Bowl Ads Sell Out for CBS at $7M for 30 Seconds (Hollywood Reporter, Nov 2023) ↩

47. Shrinkflation: obligation to inform consumers (Service-Public.fr, France, 2024): notices on downsized-but-pricier products from 1 July 2024; fines up to €3,000/€15,000. ↩

48. Amendment Enabling the KFTC to Regulate “Shrinkflation” (Kim & Chang, 2024): undisclosed downsizing made a punishable unfair-trade practice from Aug 2024. ↩

49. Shrinkflation: are brands and supermarkets required to inform consumers? (CMS Law-Now, Sept 2025): overview of French, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and Austrian rules. ↩

50. Shrinkflation Prevention Act of 2024, S.3819 (US Congress): directed the FTC to act; did not pass. ↩

51. Cadbury owner says chocolate bars are getting smaller because shoppers won’t pay more (TheJournal.ie, June 2026): Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put: “It’s not like we’re trying to fool the consumer in any way.” ↩