What’s shrinkflation, and how is it manifesting in Egypt?

🛍️📉 You’re not going crazy — that bag of chips you just bought does indeed have fewer chips to offer than it did three months ago. The price? More or less the same. That’s called shrinkflation — charging more (or the same) for less. A portmanteau of “shrink” and “inflation,” the term describes what happens when a company reduces the size, weight, or quantity of a product without a corresponding drop in price. The price may stay the same, but what you get may not — it is, at its core, hidden inflation.

Why companies do it

When input costs such as raw materials, energy, packaging, or labor rise, companies find themselves at a fork in the road: hike up the prices and risk leaving their customers in the dust, or simply take a few things out of the bag and cross their fingers that no one cares enough to notice. The latter is the most common happening, and the assumption that customers won’t take note often pays off.

There’s a reason why it works: Research has long shown that consumers are significantly more sensitive to explicit price increases than to package-size reductions. A price hike from EGP 100 to EGP 150? Easily flagged. A bag that drops from 80g to 67g? Well, not quite as easy to clock. The math lies within unit economics: cost per gram, per ounce, per serving, per minute. For companies, costs shrink; for consumers — none the wiser — the price is upped.

It’s a sneaky phenomenon

Shrinkflation is far from uncommon, but its macro impact isn’t all that impactful. Product downsizing contributed less than one-tenth of a percentage point to the 34.5% overall increase in US consumer prices from 2019-2024, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, in the product categories most affected by downsizing, the contribution of size changes to inflation ranged from 1.6-3% for many fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs).

Global inflation data may not show much of the shrinkflation impact, but households feel it in frequently purchased everyday goods that somehow seem to be running out faster than usual. That accumulates. A 2025 US survey found that 56% of US shoppers reported frequent purchases as being diminished without a corresponding price reduction.

Shrinkflation doesn’t just hit FMCGs. The same ethos — companies protecting margins by skimping on what they offer — can be found in other product categories. McDonald’s own downsizing of its menu items was recently brought to light by several loyal customers. In tech, Google’s 2026 device line-up was shredded by tech enthusiasts for shipping with less RAM than its predecessors — a product of the global RAM price crisis. And it’s not just Google — it’s happening to the entire tech industry in what is now being christened the era of tech shrinkflation.

Shrinkflation in Egypt

We’d wager a good buck that at some point this week, you’ve already come across an angry customer on social media pointing out that a Pringles tube isn’t filled all the way up top, a tin of ghee leaves room for want, or a family-sized box of Corn Flakes now seems to fit a family of just two.

It’s been happening for quite some time. When the EGP was floated in November 2016 and USD costs skyrocketed overnight, manufacturers found themselves in a bit of a pickle. Shrinkflation proved the most logical option, and some even publicly admitted to it. In May 2017, a senior product manager at Edita told local media that the snackmaker “opted to lessen the size of many of our products instead of raising prices again.”

… It was the most sensible thing to do — consumers wouldn’t have been able to keep up with what a proper price change (reflective of the economic changes) would have entailed. Several more currency devaluations would follow over the years, and the dilemma would once more be brought to light; shrink, shrink, and shrink.

Downsizing: Onsi Sawiris School of Business at the American University in Cairo’s Business Forward reported in 2019 that since the first devaluation, salty snacks have been downsizing by an average product weight of 2-4g while keeping prices unchanged. The same happened with yoghurt. In some cases, consumption rose; in others, consumers opted out entirely.

Unlike our global counterparts, we, Egyptian consumers, are aware of shrinkflation on a day-to-day basis. A 2018 study — tracking Crystal cooking oil — found that Egyptians are aware of package downsizing, but don’t necessarily act on it most of the time. However, brand perception was found to be impacted once downsizing was noted. All in all, the conclusion was this: we tolerated the downsizing, but hated that companies didn’t disclose it.

Is shrinkflation counted in Egypt’s inflation figures? The short answer: no. Egypt’s consumer price index, as measured by Capmas, tracks changes in the prices paid by consumers for a fixed basket of goods and services purchased by a sample of households. The basket is defined by package rather than by unit weight, meaning a smaller package at the same price would register as zero inflation — even though the consumer is getting less for the same money. This means the true cost of living is harder to track than official figures imply.