Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.
Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.
It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.
It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)
Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.
Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.
Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.
I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
> She's upset that the recipes are different, but [...]
That is such an entitled nerd attitude. "Someone else is inconvenienced by my obvious improvements, but clearly they are wrong."
Imagine if someone came by and "standardized" all your build scripting to use the same command line parser and all your CI recipes blew up. Yeah, it's like that. People have jobs to do, even if you don't think those jobs are important. And they've spent years (or likely decades in this particular case) doing their own process improvements and optimization work.
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.
> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)
>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.
>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.
>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”
>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.
>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and
> ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller
> than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.
Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable.
I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.
> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.
I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.
> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning
It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
2 eggs
¼c. water
⅓c. vegetable oil
and the included packet of Hershey's syrup
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)
As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.'
Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet.
Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way.
I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.
For Judith it’s about the nostalgia of being a girl and having her mother make these cookies with this method. Judith’s mom was likely over-worked and buying a box was a timesaver. Who cares if it’s not “properly” made?
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
I don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff.
And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.
I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
I have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.
You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.
I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).
Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.
Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.
I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.
Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.
Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
I’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly.
You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
My contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.
I’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother
Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.
The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.
I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains?
Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now.
>*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation.
This can't be serious
Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
I honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook.
I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you".
The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity.
On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste.
Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.
The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.
Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.
Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
It feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.
Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
She's upset that the recipes are different
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.
It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.
It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)
Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Hero.
I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.
Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.
Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.
I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
I tried my best to update several of my family recipes.
A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”.
This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
> She's upset that the recipes are different, but [...]
That is such an entitled nerd attitude. "Someone else is inconvenienced by my obvious improvements, but clearly they are wrong."
Imagine if someone came by and "standardized" all your build scripting to use the same command line parser and all your CI recipes blew up. Yeah, it's like that. People have jobs to do, even if you don't think those jobs are important. And they've spent years (or likely decades in this particular case) doing their own process improvements and optimization work.
Stay in your lane, basically.
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.
> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)
>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.
>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.
>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”
>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.
>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.
[0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...
If you still buy it, you are being played for a fool. I don’t buy shady products like this.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and
> ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller
> than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.
Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder
Wait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable.
I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.
> Ive scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
Care to share this recipe? Sounds wild.
> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.
I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.
> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning
It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
This is a link to the last time I talked about this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745
and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.'
Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet.
Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way.
I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.
For Judith it’s about the nostalgia of being a girl and having her mother make these cookies with this method. Judith’s mom was likely over-worked and buying a box was a timesaver. Who cares if it’s not “properly” made?
Do you mill your own flour? Or do you just use some boxes commercial mix like a filthy commoner?
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
I don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff.
And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.
I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.
If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.
I have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
[edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.
You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
i grew up in the U.S. and didn’t realize this fact. Thank you for explaining it, this makes so much more sense now!
This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.
I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).
Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
> None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging
I mean, they were probably all made using convenient measurements that were converted to whatever units you use after the fact.
I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.
Baking a cake IS easy. Try it out XD
Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.
I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.
Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.
Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
I’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly.
You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
My contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.
> There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes
It's not their recipes if it's from a box.
I’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.
Original source: https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-m...
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother
Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.
The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.
It's a lot easier to make from a box.
I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains?
Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
>>Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
I can't cook at all, but not sure you can call using a packet mix a "recipe". If that counts, please ask me for my recipe for beans on toast.
>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now.
>*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation.
This can't be serious
Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...
I’ll bring up this story the next time a client is arguing for a complete vendor buy-in.
Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.
Shiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.
Clif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.
This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
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If the box mix stops working then people will stop buying it and throw the recipes away, leading to a lasting reduction sales.
But… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
And thats why i hate all recipes with measuring "units" like : pinch, spoon, dash etc....
Can i tell you about our lord and saviour the have metric system? :)
I honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook.
I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you".
The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity.
On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste.
Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.
So does the mix now call for slightly smaller eggs?
Or has the mix changed to still work with the same number of eggs?
If the former, that is stupid. If the latter, then the flavour/consistency is bound to change.
This is a case study in why it’s so important to understand how your users actually use your product.
The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.
Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.
Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
This feels like when leadership has us push through a "minor change" to a service. And it causes alot of, lets say interesting, bugs downstream
Yeah but did you see the yacht it bought?
It feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are.
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.
Would Americans consider learning to bake instead?
If only there wasn't a universal unchanging unit of measure that did not depend on third parties and was used across the world.
Shrinkflation breaks userspace
Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be:
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.
Shrinkflation and private equity really do ruin everything!
bit rot, but with recipes
reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
So....just rot then?
I hope Duncan Hines is reading this.
>“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
Why?
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
A Sauceror? You can also make your own spaghetti and become a Pastamancer...
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Huh?
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
Speaking of cookie recipes, have you tried the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe?
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Is every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?
Which recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
What a Betty Crocker of Enshitification.
Why would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it?
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
Because you live in a small apartment and don't have storage space for a thing of flour, a thing of sugar, cocoa you might use twice a year?
Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Because you value convenience?
Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
The people relying on cake mid probably don’t have any of that in their pantry.