Signs of 'skimpflation' at your local supermarket
Shoppers around Australia may be familiar with supermarket shrinkflation, where products get smaller, but prices remain the same (or higher).
However, people are now being warned to watch out for skimpflation on the supermarket shelves.
If your favourite icecream is now called 'frozen dessert', it may have been impacted by skimpflation. iStock
Skimpflation is another way for a manufacturer to cut corners and keep the price the same, but they save the costs by replacing the ingredients we know and love with cheaper ingredients.
“It’s another form of a price rise in disguise and another way for manufacturers under cost pressure to save money,” Nine money expert, Joel Gibson told Today.
Joel said sometimes it may be difficult to tell, even though for example... you may have noticed the cheese on the frozen pizza you like to buy now tastes different.
“You want to look at the ones that have gone up very steeply in recent years, at the moment we’ve had big increases in meat, particularly over the last 12 months, 13 to 15, 16% on average,” he said.
“A couple of years ago, it was olive oil, prices shot up all around the world and it hasn’t gone down and what you’re seeing now is probably a lot of products that used to have 100 per cent olive oil or mostly olive oil, probably now have more of a blend, with canola oil or other cheaper oils in there.”
However, Joel said there is an interesting method of being able to tell what supermarket items have been impacted by skimpflation.
“We have food labelling laws in Australia, which to some extent, might highlight a change in ingredient,” he said.
“There’s a couple of examples recently and this is interesting because they actually had to change the name of the product because it didn’t qualify anymore as ice cream - there are some laws in Australia around what you can call ice cream, minimum 10 per cent milk solids, for example and when you dip below those thresholds, it activates a name change.
“So keep an eye out for your favourite ‘ice cream’ now being called a ‘frozen dessert’... obviously, if there’s a name change that’s a bit suss.”
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