Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

Americans: we used get the Mars bar, but it's basically the Almond Snickers now

I am curious how the composition of this chocolate bar has changed through the years .

Just like when the official kilogram ("Le Grand K") was losing weight!

Weird how the world has progressed, in many ways it is much better, from a standard of living, in others it is much worse.

I once read that Hershey has put a calories cap of 250 on a serving of their candy. That jives with what I see on the store shelves. I wonder if Mars did the same thing and perhaps the reduction in size was due (at least in part?) to that.

Let's just take a moment to appreciate the weasel who wrote this utter trash response. From the article:

> A Mars spokesperson said: "Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa."

Translation: "We think you're stupid enough to believe this nonsense, when the fact is, obviously we, as well as all our competitors, have been working over the past 25 years to trick our customers in order to increase profits."

I’ve tried a few college treats like Hot Pockets and found they are really terrible. I was a bit ashamed that I could have possibly enjoyed something that bad.

The upside of shrinkflation is that you actually may have had great taste, it was the product that declined. It’s not just the portion size, the ingredients and flavor profile are much worse.

The real question was whether it is still edible 35y later :D

I hope that Costco continues to sell its $4.99 rotisserie chicken at loss of untold millions USD a year, I couldn't make it as good at 3x the price. I guess they make it up in volume :) Some things are still ok, but we are heading towards Soylent it seems.

Grams don't measure size.

Like we hadn't noticed everything getting smaller and shittier. The stuff they sale look positively "cute" nowadays.

It’s well known they grow at approximately half a gram a year.

More than 50% bigger. 62g vs 40g.

Has someone ever adjusted the Big Mac index to account for shrinkflation? Seems like that should definitely be a part of it.

its not 50 cents anymore either

Ice cream is shrinkflated by whipping air into it. They can justify using the same size container, and allegedly selling the same volume, but much of it is just air now.

A side benefit: they can also sell it as "lower calorie" than it was before, since it's diluted with air.

EDIT: interesting to see this upvoted and then downvoted so much. Can someone who is downvoting weigh in? Seems relevant to the topic, and no one is saying it doesn't happen (or that it is happening and they like it).

That said, perhaps it's better for American's health that they shrunk the size... assuming they didn't add 20g of sugar to it to compensate

The modern version replaces a good chunk of the sugar in the old version with corn syrup and adds artificial flavor.

not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but I really do not care about shrinkflation as it related to candy, chips, chocolates, and other junk food. Obesogenic foods should be more expensive not less, even if only because it's a price incentive against eating unhealthy.

is it good? never had them

Mars Bar from 1991 found

Is that some kind of achievement? Just look in the ads/coupons in the newspaper archive if you want to see the size of foods in the past.

In the United States, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks shrinkflation as part of the Consumer Price Index:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...

Mars bars in the 90s were too big. It was disgusting towards the end. Especially the mars bar. IT was heavier than others. Snickers, Raiders, Kitkats and Lions were all more crunchy, nutty and airy.

Those products are disapeearing anyways. People used to buy packs of bars and eat them as a quick snack in the afternoon. Not anymore. It became the thing you might get at a gas station cause you're on a road trip, and it is that or beef jerky.

paging the worseonpurpose bot to vomit out 3 paragraphs of claudeslop about how private equity stole our chocolate

> Billionaire candy heiress Jacqueline Mars avoided jail time after pleading guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving for an October 4, 2013, crash in Aldie, Virginia. Her Porsche SUV crossed the center line and hit a minivan, killing 86-year-old Irene Ellisor and causing the loss of an unborn child. She received a $2,500 fine.

Just a bad bunch huh??? Guillotine

Now I'm puzzled if whatever made Mars lose its primordial water oceans and dense atmosphere could be involved in Mars Bar losing 20g.

Are smaller portions of solid blocks of sugar considered a bad thing?

This is a dumb/pointless headline + article imo. Its actually probably a GOOD thing that candy bars are smaller by default, for health reasons. What matters, and what the article fails to even mention, is the inflation-adjusted cost per gram. Not saying shrinkflation is not an issue, but this article does nothing at all to highlight it.