By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: March 28, 2011

A Stealth Downsizing, as Shoppers Pay More for Less Food – NYTimes.com

Chips are disappearing from bags, candy from boxes and vegetables from cans.

As an expected increase in the cost of raw materials looms for late summer, consumers are beginning to encounter shrinking food packages.

With unemployment still high, companies in recent months have tried to camouflage price increases by selling their products in tiny and tinier packages. So far, the changes are most visible at the grocery store, where shoppers are paying the same amount, but getting less.

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For Lisa Stauber, stretching her budget to feed her nine children in Houston often requires careful monitoring at the store. Recently, when she cooked her usual three boxes of pasta for a big family dinner, she was surprised by a smaller yield, and she began to suspect something was up.

“Whole wheat pasta had gone from 16 ounces to 13.25 ounces,” she said. “I bought three boxes and it wasn’t enough — that was a little embarrassing. I bought the same amount I always buy, I just didn’t realize it, because who reads the sizes all the time?”

Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said.

Five or so years ago, Ms. Stauber bought 16-ounce cans of corn. Then they were 15.5 ounces, then 14.5 ounces and the size is still dropping. “The first time I’ve ever seen an 11-ounce can of corn at the store was about three weeks ago, and I was just floored,” she said. “It’s sneaky because they figure people won’t know.”

In every economic downturn in the last few decades, companies have reduced the size of some products, disguising price increases and avoiding comparisons on same-size packages, before and after an increase. Each time, the marketing campaigns are coy; this time, the smaller versions are “greener” (packages good for the environment) or more “portable” (little carry bags for the takeout lifestyle) or “healthier” (fewer calories).

Where companies cannot change sizes — as in clothing or appliances — they have warned that prices will be going up, as the costs of cotton, energy, grain and other raw materials are rising.

“Consumers are generally more sensitive to changes in prices than to changes in quantity,” John T. Gourville, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School, said. “And companies try to do it in such a way that you don’t notice, maybe keeping the height and width the same, but changing the depth so the silhouette of the package on the shelf looks the same. Or sometimes they add more air to the chips bag or a scoop in the bottom of the peanut butter jar so it looks the same size.”

Thomas J. Alexander, a finance professor at Northwood University, said that businesses had little choice these days when faced with increases in the costs of their raw goods. “Companies only have pricing power when wages are also increasing, and we’re not seeing that right now because of the high unemployment,” he said.

Most companies reduce products quietly, hoping consumers are not reading labels too closely.

But the downsizing keeps occurring. A can of Chicken of the Sea albacore tuna is now packed at 5 ounces, instead of the 6-ounce version still on some shelves, and in some cases, the 5-ounce can costs more than the larger one. Bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Fritos now hold 20 percent fewer chips than in 2009, though a spokesman said those extra chips were just a “limited time” offer.

Trying to keep customers from feeling cheated, some companies are introducing new containers that, they say, have terrific advantages — and just happen to contain less product.

Kraft is introducing “Fresh Stacks” packages for its Nabisco Premium saltines and Honey Maid graham crackers. Each has about 15 percent fewer crackers than the standard boxes, but the price has not changed. Kraft says that because the Fresh Stacks include more sleeves of crackers, they are more portable and “the packaging format offers the benefit of added freshness,” said Basil T. Maglaris, a Kraft spokesman, in an e-mail.

And Procter & Gamble is expanding its “Future Friendly” products, which it promotes as using at least 15 percent less energy, water or packaging than the standard ones.

“They are more environmentally friendly, that’s true — but they’re also smaller,” said Paula Rosenblum, managing partner for retail systems research at Focus.com, an online specialist network. “They announce it as great new packaging, and in fact what it is is smaller packaging, smaller amounts of the product,” she said.

Cargo thieves step up activity

Aug 17, 2009 10:18 AM, By Sean Kilcarr, senior editor

According to a new cargo crime trend report, cargo thieves are becoming more organized and are more frequently targeting trucking company facilities for their heists.

Data compiled by LoJack Supply Chain Integrity via its Supply Chain Information Sharing and Analysis Center (SC-ISAC) in the second quarter this year noted that 34 cargo theft incidents occurred at trucking company facilities, including secured drop yards, an increase of more than 300% over the number of thefts at such carrier facilities in the first quarter of 2009. The number two and three locations for theft were at truck stops (24 incidents) and parking lots (21 incidents), LoJack SCI said.

“This theft trend tells us that these loads were under surveillance and had been targeted from their point of origin, implying that these criminal acts were the results of very specific planning at the hands of organized thieves,” said Robert Furtado, LoJack SCI’s CEO. It also shows cargo thieves are becoming bolder as well, as they are seeking out vehicles containing cargo even when secured with fencing and other surveillance systems, targeting very specific loads versus simply pursuing “opportunistic” thefts, he noted.

LoJack’s Data

LoJack SCI’s cargo theft trend bulletin also revealed that vehicles and their cargoes are at rest for a shorter period of time before they are stolen. For example, in the second quarter of 2009, the company identified 19 incidents that occurred in less than four hours time, eight of which had been parked for less than one hour. This is a further indication that thieves are more organized, targeting specific locations and/or loads and not relying on “chance” to secure stolen items, said Furtado.

The company’s cargo theft data is based on a total of 221 incidents LoJack SCI collected and analyzed from the 1,650 users and 650 member companies of its SC-ISAC network.

Federal law enforcement trend data backs up LoJack SCI’s findings. “There are some cargo thefts that are crimes of opportunity, but the vast majority are committed by criminal enterprises,” noted Ron Koziol, assistant section chief-violent crime section of the criminal investigative division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). “Sophisticated cargo theft groups plan the operations through surveillance of truck stops and distribution centers. They carry equipment to defeat tractor/trailer security mechanisms, they pre-position empty trailers to offload the stolen cargo trailer, or they may temporarily rent warehouse space to transfer loads between a stolen trailer and a legitimate trailer,” Koziol told FleetOwner.

“Many of the criminal enterprises seen today may be organized based on familial, ethnic, or nationality ties,” he added. “Also, they may employ violent street gang members, have established complex multi-jurisdictional theft, fencing and distribution operations, and are sometimes involved in other types of criminal activities such as drug trafficking, money laundering, violent crimes, and other property crimes like organized retail thefts.”

How they do it?

Industry professionals also report seeing more organization within the ranks of cargo thieves. Walt Fountain, director of enterprise security at TL carrier Schneider National, told FleetOwner that his company is indeed seeing more reports of thieves targeting warehouses and other facilities. In effect, “they are going where the freight is,” he said.

“These are sophisticated [cargo theft] crews working the business, spending weeks, if not months targeting warehouses,” Fountain said. “There’s more profit in that than chasing tractor-trailers down the highway.”

However, he added that thefts from truckstops or other unprotected parking areas still remains the real threat. “Any kind of unprotected area where trucks and trailers may stop is what worries us,” Fountain said. “That’s why we work constantly with our drivers to maintain cargo security discipline, making sure they follow security procedures at all times to lower their risk of theft, while we send them regular updates on developing cargo theft ‘hot spots’ so they are kept in the loop about the bigger cargo crime picture.”

“The fact that thieves are stealing goods increasingly from secured areas is further proof that ‘cargo at rest is cargo at risk,’ even if the cargo is located in an area with some measures of physical security,” added Lojack SCI’s Furtado. “It’s further proof that companies need to take extra precautions to ensure their loads—as well as their trucks and trailers—are fully protected from today’s sophisticated thieves.”