Mildly Infuriating

Food products, probably. In clothes or cars, for example, you can't just make things smaller. With clothes, it seems more like skimpflation - some items definitely had thinner-feeling fabric right after COVID, although it got better again. With cars, they just raise the price, so that's inflation.

If costs go up you have to do one of the three. You're probably not getting angry phone calls because your Mars bar went down by 1g, but might if it's more expensive or tastes like shit, so that's the advantage there.

Damn those are some grippers

It's a weird thing to think about, but in a ship-of-Theseus sort of way a lot of the products we grew up with don't really exist anymore. By that I mean, if it's half the size and made of different ingredients then the Mars Bar as it was introduced has effectively been discontinued. There's just some other, crappier knock-off being sold under the same name now.

That's almost the worst part. Not only is the food ultra-processed now, but it's all engineered to extract every fraction of a penny in margins.
If this goes on, I might as well just inject palm oil straight to my veins.

IMO the size is irrelevant after how they ruined the filling. And I bet the chocolate shell is also not as good as it used to be. They used to be an automatic buy when i saw them in stores because they are so good. In their current form, I don't understand why people bother getting them at all.

Ahead of his time on the call out. Now corporations just shrinkflate openly.

That's the official inflation numbers, which are lies. It's an open secret that in the 90s there was a political movement among the owners to artificially lower reported inflation (see: Boskin Commission for example) because it would boost the economy (on paper) while letting them absorb the gains.

Underreporting by 1-2% a year doesn't seem like much until you do it for several decades. Looking at actual inflation instead of the reported lie, that mars bar is closer to $2 today. Shrinkflation had to happen to keep the bigger con going. Most businesses will, of course, cheat the margins at every instance.

TLDR; shrinkflation is a symptom, not the disease

I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn't also decreased.

Translation:

we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand

People don't by Mars because it's a top-tier, gucci product.

alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa

And if we stayed the same size, it'd be really expensive, because among other things the global climate no longer supports chocolate production.

TBF none of it is a lie. That's as close as corporate-speak comes to "yup we did that".

I’m sure your customers have been demanding smaller bars that cost more.

Well, their customers have kept on buying their products so clearly they don't care too much.

"We didn't only shrink the size, we also lowered the quality of ingredients to maximize profits!"

I can eat many, but they never completely fill the void inside.

Not really. That bar was 62.5g while modern ones are 40g. So to offset shrinkflation you'd have to eat about 1.5 modern bars, not 3-4.