“Shrinkflation”: soon posters on shelves to alert consumers

The government will force supermarkets to put up a poster alerting consumers of a reduction in quantities of a product at unchanged prices, promised Minister for Trade Olivia Grégoire, interviewed by Ouest-France. “From July 1, when products (food or non-food for that matter) will be “shrinkflated”, in other words will see their quantity decrease but not their prices, “there will be a poster on the shelf for two months”, said Olivia Grégoire in this interview posted online Thursday evening. On this poster, “will be written: for this product, the quantity sold has increased from X to Y and its price per kilo, gram or liter has increased by X% or X EUR,” she elaborated.

The decree, “signed on April 16,” is currently “on the Prime Minister’s table” and “should be published” in the Official Journal “in the coming days,” assured the minister. “Shrinkflation” - from the English verb “shrink”, to shrink - consists, for manufacturers of consumer products, agro-industrialists or distributors, of reducing the quantities of products sold rather than increasing - too much - significantly the prices . The distributor Carrefour had, for example, drastically reduced the quantities of its "first price" vegetables to remain below 1 euro, the media reminded 60 million consumers in December, evoking the transition from three to two salads or the reduction of a third of the potato fillet.

“If a decree comes out, we will respect it and apply it but we regret it”, indicated in January the boss of the 4th French distributor, Système U, Dominique Schelcher. “It is the manufacturer who knows that his packaging has been reduced, that the recipe has been called into question,” he said, fearing “a waste of time” for the in-store teams. “It is up to the manufacturer to write it on its packaging,” also reacted the representative of the supermarket leader E.Leclerc, Michel-Edouard Leclerc.

Olivia Grégoire also indicated that she wanted this obligation to fall, in the future, on manufacturers rather than on the distributor, and this, at the European level, on the occasion of a “revision of the rules of information consumer opinion on foodstuffs in Europe in 2025.”