Why ‘skimpflation’ irks consumers more than ‘shrinkflation’ or price hikes

Brands facing inflation and supply chain fluctuations have alternatives to simply raising prices. One, shrinkflation, is when brands shrink the size of the product, often imperceptibly, while keeping the price the same. Another, skimpflation, is when brands reduce product quality, often subtly reformulating products with cheaper ingredients or materials.

Consumers don’t tend to get out their pom-poms for either: Among consumers who noticed a product had been shrinkflated, 44.3% switched brands, while among those who noticed a product had been skimpflated, 54.1% switched brands, according to a 2024 survey by consumer insights platform AYTM.

In 2022, Conagra faced a backlash after consumers noticed Smart Balance’s buttery spread had reduced its vegetable oil content from 64% to 39% and that water had gone from the second ingredient to the first (and most plentiful). Conagra responded by returning to the original recipe.

In a paper published online in the Journal of Consumer Research in July, Ioannis Evangelidis, associate professor of marketing at Esade Business School in Barcelona, detailed 10 studies he conducted with consumers. The studies found that when consumers were told how companies had responded to rising costs, they viewed skimpflation as a more unfair approach than shrinkflation, and simply raising prices as the least unfair of the three.

When it came to purchase intent, consumers were least willing to buy a skimpflated product; they were about equally willing to buy products whose prices had risen or that had been shrinkflated. To learn more about the research, we asked Evangelidis about his findings and their implications.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What was your clearest finding about which of the three consumers dislike most: raising prices, shrinkflation, or skimpflation?

The majority of people think it’s unfair to change ingredients to reduce quality, followed by shrinkflation…The vast majority of people say it’s fair to raise your prices when your costs go up.

When it comes to purchase behavior, you see that people react to inflation. When you change the quality, when you change the ingredients—once they know, they’re way less likely to buy. But they don’t respond differently to a price increase [than to] shrinkflation. Even though they think shrinkflation is unfair, they will still buy the product at the same rate as if you were to raise the price, which is quite interesting.

Why do you think changing the recipe or the formulation is the thing that people find the most infuriating?

I thought it was mostly because of the transparency. So people think, “Wait, it’s even more deceptive what they’re trying to do here because I don’t know the full list of ingredients, and even if I do, it’s hard to notice.”

But there’s also the other element: The experience changes—the “consumption experience,” as we say in marketing. So people cannot get what they were getting before the change. With shrinkflation, you still get the same product…you are getting the same exact consumer experience. But once you change the ingredients, maybe you don’t.

When consumers post about finding examples of shrinkflation and skimpflation, they can really blow up on TikTok and Reddit. How does social media change the risk for brands?

For firms, it obviously represents an increase in the risk that they will be detected because maybe you don’t notice, but someone else will. So it changes the landscape completely, because it makes the risks much higher. Eventually, someone will find out.

Consumers can be very loyal to particular brands, but your experiments largely asked about hypothetical, unbranded products. How might that affect your findings?

As academics, we try to study a research question in the most clean way without [a specific] product or brand, so people have no priors. But to your question, my intuition is that these types of violations, like skimpflation, would have stronger effects when people are more loyal to a brand. When you have loyalty to a brand and the brand changes the quality, then people will find it [to be] a huge, huge deal. It’s a big infringement on the concept of the product and what [they’re] consuming.