The Food Scout

Okay, I can handle the stock market shrinking for awhile, because it’s going to come back, right? (Right?) But there are some things in life that, once you’ve crossed the threshold you can never come back (in this case I’ll focus just on the food world), and that 

I can’t document the day when the coffee industry moved off its standard 16 oz. size, but I read online that that transgression began in the 1960s, where we now find a “pound” of coffee weighing in at just over 11 oz.

Perhaps jars of spaghetti sauce (which now weigh more like 28 oz. than 32 oz. in previous years) and jars of peanut butter (only 16 oz. instead of 18), aren’t as sacred, but some members of the ice cream industry upset my world a few years ago when the half-gallon standard shrank a few ounces. I held a container of Breyer’s a week ago and realized that it has shrunken a second time to a mere 1.5 quarts from a smaller 1.75.

But today’s blog is written to remind us of all of this because I just read, to my disappointment, that Haagen Dazs shrank its pint-sized premium ice cream to 14 ounces, joining the graveyard of packaging standards that have been violated. And there’s no going back. Even if gas and ingredient prices were to be permanently frozen by the government, do you think these companies would return to the full sized containers? No way. We’re stuck with 14 oz. of ice cream, and from the looks of things, it’s about 2 years away from becoming a 12 oz. container - which is barely enough ice cream for one person!  ;)