Food price inflation is one of the staple non-satire topics of this blog for several reasons. Count us among the dwindling number of people who know that fish does not grow in square blocks, or that cows produce milk of various shades of white while chocolate milk is made by adding chocolate to the white base product.
Food prices are subject to a wide range of factors, many obvious, such as weather and climate, plant and animal diseases, crude oil prices, evil speculation and more, others are very sneaky.
A few grams off of the package size here, some water sprayed onto birds when they are frozen, to name just two.
Here is a recent list of the Hamburg, Germany, consumer advocate association. It is in German but you'll understand easily because they have the "price hike" column in red.
One other meat cheat we have seen grow in popularity here does not even look like one. Stores and producers can claim to merely cater to an increasing demand in prepared food in a culture where cooking from scratch is in decline. We are talking about pre-seasoned cuts, for instance, steaks with spicy marinade. Which is mostly water and vinegar, but at least there is a real benefit for the non cooking consumers.
Our packaged summer time treat, ice cream, is another product that undergoes the sneaky sort of inflation you won't read much about.
Ice cream tubs around here prominently feature the size in volume units, which have been fairly standard, usually around 1 liter, at even 100 ml increments. Taking a few ml out, for instance, going from 1000 ml to 985 ml isn't a good option.
This leaves two basic cheats:
1) Change the container shape, add the English qualifier "Premium", and raise the price.
2) Change the ingredients. Use less of the more expensive ingredients. The most recent round of change to our beloved Italian amarena cherry ice cream has left us with a single cherry and some juice in each tub.
Of course, you can combine the two options, which the manufacturer in question decided to do. Instead of a standard round tub, we now see a square container featuring a convex lid (giving the impression of greater volume) as well as a bold Premium across the top.
The new price is 30 Euro cents higher than the old.
How do they get a single cherry into each tub?
Modern engineering, my friends.
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