How can biscuit and cake manufacturers get away with ripping people off? - Rev Neil McNicholas

I think everyone is well aware of the long-running controversy over Wagon Wheel biscuits. There is no question that they are smaller than they used to be, everybody knows it, we’re not stupid. But the manufacturer continues to deny it, instead of being honest enough to admit the truth. Do they think we will eventually accept that we imagined the whole thing – a great biscuit amnesia that affected the entire population?

The deception continues and is now spreading to other manufacturers and products and in particular boxed ‘fancy cakes’ and multi-pack biscuits, especially where chocolate is involved.

To begin with one of the biggest deceptions is in the packaging which appears to be the same standard size that we have always been used to.

However, when you open it up, and of course by then you are at home and it is too late to put it back on the shelf in disgust, there will be a plastic former inside to supposedly protect the product from damage, but it will typically take up at least a third of the space, leaving at the most two-thirds for the product. Is no one in trading standards checking on these things? So much, also, for saving the planet by reducing plastic and other non-essential packaging.

In the case of cake slices, they will be even smaller than the individual spaces in the plastic former. If you place them side-by-side they may be as much as half the size of the box they come in and usually also a lot smaller than the illustration on the wrapper that is supposed to let you know what you are buying.

Again trading standards is apparently not checking and obviously the manufacturer isn’t going to say anything – like letting you know that you are actually paying for fresh air rather than the cakes or biscuits you were hoping for.

It’s the same thing with multi-packs. I recently bought a six-pack of a well-known chocolate-covered snack only to find that they were actually quite small compared to those you can buy individually.

It was difficult to assess their size because of the cardboard base inside the packaging. I bought a multi-pack simply for the convenience and expected each bar to be the normal size – which they weren’t and there was nothing on the packaging to alert customers to the fact that they were buying a smaller product.

I should have listened to them rattling around inside. We will have to become a nation of “squeezers” like our mothers used to be with bread – people poking and prodding and squeezing packaging in order to determine what size the product is inside.

And next time you buy a box of chocolates, or are given one as a gift, while the box itself will be the usual size, you will immediately notice how small each individual chocolate is.

Once upon a time each layer, if there were two, would be filled to capacity, each chocolate right next to its neighbour with only a thin paper shell between them and corrugated paper between the layers.

These days the chocolates are in, again, a plastic former with the result that they are much smaller and there’s no depth to them either. The box is basically full of plastic packaging, and where three or four chocolates would once have filled you up, now you will have to eat most of an entire layer for the same effect.

And they are all doing it. Check how full your yoghurt pots are these days? How many fish fingers do you find you have to use to make a decent sandwich?

Oven-bake meat pies are increasingly all pie and very little meat. Pizzas tend to be all crust and not much topping. At least a pint of milk is still a pint – for now anyway. And if companies can’t make a profit by reducing costs, they’ll increase the price instead – either way we lose.

Do manufacturers honestly think people won’t notice, or are they gambling on the fact that they are now selling to a generation or two of consumers who don’t know any different?

Do these companies hold – as they do in my imagination – clandestine after-hours meetings to work out a redesign of their machinery and production lines in order to use less and make smaller, with everyone involved sworn to secrecy?

We’ll never know because no one is going to tell. We’re never going to read the headline: “Chocolate factory worker spills the beans”.

Rev Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm.