Economy – “It's a scam”: Biden attacks snack producers for reducing size and not prices

First modification: 02/13/2024 – 03:15

The president of the United States, Joe Biden, did not need to mention which companies he was referring to when he spoke about how they “scam” consumers, in a short video published on his social network X minutes before Super Bowl LVIII began, on Sunday, February 11.

In a speech in which he called for an end to the practice known as “shrinkflation,” the president was accompanied by products such as Gatorade, Doritos and Tostitos, manufactured by PepsiCo, or Breyers ice cream from the giant Unilever.

Redflation, or inflationary contraction, occurs when companies maintain the prices of their products but reduce their size, a practice that the US head of state called for eliminating.

For this reason, he took advantage of the attention on the Super Bowl to launch a bitter criticism: “as an ice cream lover, what makes me most angry is that the boxes have been reduced in size, but not in price. I am 'fed up' with what is known as 'redufflation'. It's a theft!”.

“Some companies are trying to do something quickly: they reduce products little by little, hoping that we don't notice (…) Give me a break. The American public is tired of being taken for fools,” he added.

Senator Bob Casey released a report in December showing the impact of redflation on products from toilet paper to Oreo cookies.

In his investigation, the legislator found that, for example, the price of snacks such as Oreos and Doritos had increased by 26.4% since January 2019, and that increasingly smaller portions represented 9.8% of that increase.

With Reuters