Mondelez International is guilty of misleading consumers!
The ruling concerns a lawsuit filed last year by the consumer association Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg e.V. over the company reducing the size of Milka chocolate bars from 100 g to 90 g without clearly informing consumers. Milka Alpine Milk received the title of “deceptive packaging of the year 2025” from Hamburg consumers. At the same time the weight dropped from 100 g to 90 g, the price went from €1.49 to €1.99.
The judges ruled that information about reducing the product’s weight must remain on the packaging for at least four months after the change is introduced. The exact wording was left to the company. The ruling is not yet final—the company has already announced an appeal.
Let’s be honest. These practices are widespread and have existed for years under the name —downsizing—slightly and barely noticeably reducing package sizes, or often just the amount of product inside.
It’s a way of deceiving customers and sneaking through price increases people barely notice. Today the phenomenon is more often called shrinkflation, and under that name it has finally started getting wider attention. Also, since COVID, businesses using inflation and market disruptions as excuses for raising prices became so common and so painful for consumers that people finally started talking about it. FINALLY!
The Hamburg consumer organization has been highlighting the issue for quite a while in different ways.
It filed the lawsuit against Mondelez International at the end of August last year in the regional court in Bremen, where the German branch of the company is registered.
The lawsuit concerned “misleading packaging.” In the exact same package, the corporation was selling chocolate that was 1 millimeter thinner.
And come the fuck on—nobody goes grocery shopping with a caliper.
Armin Valet from the Hamburg organization said at the time:
“Many consumers have been buying Milka chocolate for years in familiar packaging and assume the amount of chocolate inside hasn’t changed. But they are being misled, because many varieties now contain only 90 grams, while the price remains the same or is even higher.”
The organization monitors the phenomenon and publishes results on a dedicated page that already contains more than 1,000 misleadingly packaged products:
Misleading Packaging List (Mogelpackungsliste)
Consumers can also report misleading packaging there themselves.
And by the way, as usual, the Germans already have a perfect word for it: Mogelpackung — “deceptive packaging.”
A related phenomenon becoming increasingly common is skimming — lowering product quality itself, for example by reducing the cocoa content in chocolate.
To be fair, producers and retailers really are struggling with the highest cocoa price increases in history over recent years. They are under pressure from rising production costs—energy prices are going through the roof too—while at the same time consumers are cutting spending harder and harder.
From a business perspective, deception becomes the most rational solution.
If “the sole purpose of business is profit maximization,” and on a broader level endless accumulation and concentration of capital, then from the perspective of a corporation any action serving that goal becomes not only acceptable but desirable.
The profits of increasingly mythical “shareholders” and “investors” become the only law and morality.
No crime is considered unacceptable if it brings more profit than losses. It only becomes “bad” when the costs get too high — for example, court penalties.
The history of the food industry is basically the history of fighting against how greed poisons all of us — often quite literally.
If we look back into history, we find the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act, the British food adulteration law from 1860. It was introduced after the uproar caused by the work of Thomas Wakley and Arthur Hill Hassall. Wakley was not only a surgeon and founder of The Lancet, but also a member of parliament raising the issue of food adulteration publicly.
At the time, common practices in the United Kingdom included:
- Bread whitened with toxic alum, with gypsum and chalk added to it.
- Milk diluted with water and thickened with flour.
- Toxic copper salts, arsenic, and chromium used to preserve and intensify colors.
- Tea mixed with leaves from other plants, and — as mentioned during parliamentary debates — even silkworm excrement.
- Coffee massively adulterated with chicory and even dark sugar.
To quote a classic, “That’s how the free market works.”
Inevitably, not only does bad money drive out good money—worse products replace better ones too.
And reducing the weight of a chocolate bar may seem trivial compared to adding gypsum to bread, but it’s the foot in the door.
If we don’t chop that foot off by slamming the door shut, we’re on the road back to exactly those kinds of practices.
Which is why it’s good there are still judges in Bremen who don’t kneel before the modern monarch—big capital.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.