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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
- AfterHIA 1y agoShiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.
- brianwawok 1y agoI feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
- lbourdages 1y agoThe thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two. Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoSure, and ads are a nice thing on websites. At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks. Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
- stephen_g 1y agoDo you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
- lbourdages 1y agoWe do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it. A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
- apparent 1y agoSome stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
- dripton 1y agoWe do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't. I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
- iterance 1y agoConsumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
- neilv 1y agoI wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands. What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste. And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults). Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes. (If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
- bluGill 1y agoIt seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
- kjkjadksj 1y agoParty size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.
- illegalsmile 1y agoI've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.
- yepitwas 1y agoAmount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents. Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example. (Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
- vachina 1y agoIn Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.
- account42 1y agoIt's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler. Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.
- blamazon 1y agoIf you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
- mh- 1y ago> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse. [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
- Avshalom 1y agoI can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common. Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
- neilv 1y agoI've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that... From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different. My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
- beloch 1y agoCookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
- MangoToupe 1y agoBaking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
- senkora 1y agoThis definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box. Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
- estimator7292 1y ago[flagged]
- Loughla 1y agoUm. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies. You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients. Maybe people will start doing that?
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoSales of betty crocker mix can go down. Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
- relaxing 1y agovanilla and sugar has also shrinkflated
- MangoToupe 1y agoVanilla and sugar are both relatively fungible commodities. If one brand shrinks, buy another one.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoThis is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
- DonHopkins 1y agoWhat a Betty Crocker of Enshitification.
- rimprobablyly 1y ago[flagged]
- analog8374 1y agoSpeaking of cookie recipes, have you tried the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe? Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate... Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoIs every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?
- mijowi 1y agoWhich recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.
- xbar 1y agoThe one from email spam circa 2003?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- eulgro 1y agoWhy would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it? Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
- eichin 1y agoAccording to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
- inferiorhuman 1y agoSo, cake flour?
- al_borland 1y agoFrom what I remember it’s more about the industrial emulsifiers. They give a more sponge-like cake they people tend to enjoy.
- davebranton 1y agoI very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets. This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there. In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
- Havoc 1y agoYeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this. Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
- haunter 1y ago>“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
- nightfly 1y agoWhy?
- MostlyStable 1y agoThere are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoA lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
- mattkrause 1y agoFor cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThat may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nanolith 1y agoMuch to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume. She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility. Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
- Balgair 1y agoWait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThey still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
- striking 1y ago
- cptskippy 1y agoI wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes. It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge. My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
- rimprobablyly 1y agoHopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
- xbar 1y agoI hope Duncan Hines is reading this.
- UberFly 1y agoShrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
- sigwinch 1y agoShrinkflation means that those mixes rely on more sugar or corn syrup solids. Maybe the idea is to keep both serving size and nutrition facts consistent while dropping 3 oz off the box.
- kikokikokiko 1y agoThe most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
- cosmotic 1y agoIf the box mix stops working then people will stop buying it and throw the recipes away, leading to a lasting reduction sales.
- al_borland 1y agoI assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
- Spooky23 1y agoBut… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.
- tagawa 1y agoOriginal source: https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-mix-23687784 https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-m...
- cbhl 1y agoAssuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be: - 2 boxes cake mix - 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs) - 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c) YMMV
- declan_roberts 1y agoWhen I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are. They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
- ip26 1y agoThe no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.
- twodave 1y agoI looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
- roxolotl 1y agoYou can actually buy stuff like that if you really want to keep a mix on hand. The King Arthur powders are great: https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-milk https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m... https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-powder https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow... And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter: https://hoosierhillfarm.com/shop-products/butter-powder/ https://hoosierhillfarm.com/shop-products/butter-powder/
- ksenzee 1y agoWhy on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
- pluc 1y agoYeah but did you see the yacht it bought?
- geeblegobble 1y agoJudith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
- ksenzee 1y agoThat’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
- dwedge 1y agoSure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea
- ksenzee 1y agoYeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually think everyone’s mom’s recipe for everything is the equivalent of a traditional furniture build?
- dwedge 1y agoI'm wondering if this isn't mostly an American thing. I have no qualms admitting that my recipes are from other recipes, but I modified them
- charles_f 1y agoWhat I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that. With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
- moolcool 1y ago> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
- bruce511 1y agoSame people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat. My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes. When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?
- crazygringo 1y agoBecause we use those ingredients constantly and regularly. You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months. It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
- bruce511 1y agoI think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :) "Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me. First World Problems I guess...
- nixosbestos 1y agoI love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
- al_borland 1y agoShrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
- Spooky23 1y agoNot always. Canned tuna is my favorite. They shrunk the 6oz can to 5 over a decade or so. At one point I laughed at a 5 3/16 oz can.
- kurtis_reed 1y agoHuh?
- RandomBacon 1y agoDon't feed the idiological troll.
- nixosbestos 1y agoSuuuuure, grocery store consolidation, and the consolidation of farming, and processed food has NOTHING to do with their ability to arbitrarily implement shrinkflation, with consumers having few or no other options. Also, kindly fuck off with the name-calling.
- 1y ago
- mjcohen 1y agoClif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.
- DimmieMan 1y agoLeavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too. The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient. Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
- sigwinch 1y agoThe “healthy request” or “low sodium” cans will have potassium chloride and sugar added, compared to the conventional.
- anigbrowl 1y agoI think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
- user1999919 1y agobit rot, but with recipes reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
- audiodude 1y agoSo....just rot then?
- user1999919 1y agomore like a funny sort of dependency drift
- lifeformed 1y agoI feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.
- marticode 1y agoBasic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder. The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
- globular-toast 1y agoI've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe. Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed. Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).
- safety1st 1y agoSuch a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.
- brettermeier 1y agoBaking a cake IS easy. Try it out XD
- sersi 1y agoMaking cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.
- tavavex 1y agoI have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix. But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
- account42 1y ago> I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix. Yes but how do you use that to make the line go up enough to justify a pay rise for yourself.
- foobar1962 1y agoProbably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location. https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pancakes/ https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...
- lacoolj 1y agoI first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit) Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back. Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
- julianz 1y agoThis does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.
- cogman10 1y agoIt usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
- blahedo 1y agoNeal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
- jandrewrogers 1y agoI lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it. Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas. NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.
- DoneWithAllThat 1y agoNo, he didn’t. What he was referring to was combining finished products to create new dishes. Not using pre mix products.
- 1y ago
- blahedo 1y agoOh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before. So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
- blahedo 1y agoThis is a link to the last time I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745 and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539 EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here: 3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme) 2 eggs ¼c. water ⅓c. vegetable oil and the included packet of Hershey's syrup The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.) As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
- imglorp 1y agoOk so this is the cake pan thread. They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?
- NathanaelRea 1y agoShrinkflation breaks userspace
- ericdotlee 1y agoShrinkflation and private equity really do ruin everything!
- excalibur 1y agoNot strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
- jedimastert 1y agoFor those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
- Eric_WVGG 1y agoA story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit. [edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared
- Pikamander2 1y agoI have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way. They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes. I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.
- rtkwe 1y agoThe holes are for safety to let the steam escape so it doesn't all come out right where you're opening it and potentially burn your hand and stirring half way through just evens out the natural hot spots that occur in microwaves. Neither really affects the taste significantly.
- 0xffff2 1y agoYou have a magical microwave that heats things evenly throughout then. Normal microwaves heat from the outside in so you have to do the stirring and letting sit to get an even temperature throughout.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- samrus 1y agoThis feels like when leadership has us push through a "minor change" to a service. And it causes alot of, lets say interesting, bugs downstream
- rustystump 1y agoThe level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts. Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article. Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
- niemandhier 1y agoI’ll bring up this story the next time a client is arguing for a complete vendor buy-in. Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.
- estomagordo 1y agoWould Americans consider learning to bake instead?
- darkamaul 1y agoI’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly. You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
- JR1427 1y agoSo does the mix now call for slightly smaller eggs? Or has the mix changed to still work with the same number of eggs? If the former, that is stupid. If the latter, then the flavour/consistency is bound to change.
- smcl 1y ago> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and > ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller > than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, > whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder
- kortilla 1y agoWait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.
- xandrius 1y agoThat's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.
- 2dvisio 1y agoTraditionally Limoncello is not done via distillation process. But infusion. Like many of the other Italian alcoholic beverages (various versions of amari, nocino, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limoncello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limoncello
- shmeeed 1y agoIn many parts of the world, that's absolutely a thing grandpas do :)
- Freak_NL 1y agoTotally. An Austrian fellow (who was indeed a grandfather) we rented a cottage from did this and told us about when I asked about what he was going to do with the hundreds of apples falling from his ancient apple tree. Apparently it's legal there to distil your own eau de vie at a non-commercial scale. We went home with a complementary empty plastic water bottle filled with his Schnaps. It used to be a thing in the Netherlands too, but the lack of legality made that a much less popular hobby.
- sebstefan 1y ago>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now. >*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation. This can't be serious Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?
- teekert 1y agoOk, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.' Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet. Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way. I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.
- kortilla 1y agoDo you mill your own flour? Or do you just use some boxes commercial mix like a filthy commoner?
- teekert 1y agoI don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper. That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine. With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well. Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo. I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.
- paintbox 1y ago
- gadders 1y ago>>Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil I can't cook at all, but not sure you can call using a packet mix a "recipe". If that counts, please ask me for my recipe for beans on toast.
- moomin 1y agoThis is a case study in why it’s so important to understand how your users actually use your product.
- vincnetas 1y agoAnd thats why i hate all recipes with measuring "units" like : pinch, spoon, dash etc.... Can i tell you about our lord and saviour the have metric system? :)
- xandrius 1y agoI honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook. I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you". The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity. On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste. Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.
- account42 1y agoIn US recipes a cup doesn't mean whatever literal cup you have in you cupboard, it means 237ml. If you cook a lot it pays to have measuring cups of the appropriate size.
- internet_points 1y agoIt feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.
- bob1029 1y agoCooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable. I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens. The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.
- sersi 1y ago> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg. > The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
- bob1029 1y ago> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer) How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.
- asciimov 1y agoI’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.
- bapak 1y agoIf only there wasn't a universal unchanging unit of measure that did not depend on third parties and was used across the world.
- Liftyee 1y agoI'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains? Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
- sigwinch 1y agoI assume it creates an opportunity for the old formula to arrive at a premium price and packaging.
- PetriCasserole 1y agoMy contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.
- philipallstar 1y ago> There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes It's not their recipes if it's from a box.
- drewg123 1y agoI have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).
- torginus 1y agoI don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff. And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.
- ricardobeat 1y ago> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil > whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
- wccrawford 1y agoIt's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately. The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee. It's a lot easier to make from a box.
- lm28469 1y ago> There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch" Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them
- account42 1y ago> It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". I don't buy it. A basic cake recipe is simple measuring (with enough tolerance that anyone can do it), mixing and pouring. No special skills required. > Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Ok, for sufficiently small values of "not quite the same", but so what? There's going to be more significant differences in your eating experience than the cake having a tiny bit more sugar or whatever. And companies change their mix all the time too.
- wink 1y agoEveryone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago. Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.
- eagerpace 1y agoWe’re a technical crowd here, we understand inflation, and we can do math. I suspect most of us here are in a position to change the world, make things better, healthier, safer, faster. It is difficult for me to empathize with “I just can’t out of principle” when the change is so minimal. How can we ever fix big problems if people can’t adapt to such small ones? She didn’t have to deal with inflation for the last 30 years, now she is having to deal with some. To me, the bigger change would be for people to have to go without her cookies! I hope those of us growing up in this faster changing world can remember in our later years that change is necessary.
- Finnucane 1y agoNot quite the same, but I am reminded of the disturbance in the force when Nabisco discontinued the chocolate wafer cookies that everyone used for cheesecake crusts.
- MisterTea 1y agoFunny enough, in my family we never used boxed mix. My grandmother did everything using a measuring cup and raw ingredients. My mother thought boxed mixes were full of chemicals and not as natural as using individual ingredients. Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.
- oliwarner 1y ago> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. Passing down a box mixture as a "recipe" seems really alien to me in the UK. Measuring flour, sugar and spice isn't rocket surgery. What other branded products do you guys depend on for basic cooking? Campbell's soup had a moment here postwar.
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- djmips 1y agoGeneral Mills should release "Recipe Perfect" (old size) box in a brilliant ad campaign. They can still sell the smaller boxes with the name "Right Size" for the family - "Perfect portions for today's families"
- account42 1y agoI don't get the point of cake mixes. How hard is it to measure and mix a couple of dry ingredients to make whatever you want instead of buying pre-made mixes for every different type of cake/bread/etc.
- deafpolygon 1y agoThis is one of the reasons why my recipes standardize on ingredients you can source from any grocery store, and not on specific brand items. I will include it in the recipe as a shortcut, but then show the substitution methods if such an item is unavailable or unreliable.