More Ice Cream Shrinkage

A few months ago, I was complaining about ice cream containers shrinking without any change in price or acknowledgement that it had even happened. We're pretty much down to a quart and a half all the way around in ice cream by now. But I was back in the grocery store again tonight and I just happened to notice that the shrinkage isn't limited to just larger containers of ice cream. Häagen-Dazs has dropped the size of their quart-size containers by more than 10 percent, making them 14 ounces now. To their credit, though, they at least explain themselves on their Web site. Basically, the answer is that they had to, but at least they're not dropping the quality of their product (so they claim).

Even weirder was Dove ice cream, which has dropped from a pint down to 15.1 ounces. And, unlike Häagen-Dazs, they seem to be keeping a low profile on that nine-tenths of an ounce. If you click on any of the cartons of ice cream on the Web page, you'll get a list of ingredients and the nutritional information (but not the net weight). Nutritional information has to be based on a particular serving size, and in this case, it's half a cup. When noting how many servings are in the containter, however, they can only come up with "about 4." No, not about 4--we know that it's not slightly above 4. Therefore, it's slightly less than 4. Whatever happened to truth in packaging?

Fortunately, Ben & Jerry's was still sitting firmly at a pint, the full 16 ounces. We can't know how long that can last, but at least there are things we can count on for now.