Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

drtz

Reducing the portion size for junk food is probably a good thing. This is a rare case where shrinkflation may actually be beneficial to all parties.

peezd

What a world we live in, that someone finding a 35 year old candy bar while cleaning out a hoarder's house gets its own tier 1 news article.

Qem

Now I'm puzzled if whatever made Mars lose its primordial water oceans and dense atmosphere could be involved in Mars Bar losing 20g.

wartywhoa23

Has BBC just discovered shrinkflation?

terranivium

my childhood friend's grandparents were mars testers, their whole basement was full of mars bars!

throwup238

Are smaller portions of solid blocks of sugar considered a bad thing?

jonplackett

I’d be more interested in the ingredients. I would guess the 91 version has a lot less weird stuff in it?

SoftTalker

Seems like I see sizes go up and down. Slow shrinkflation, then one day "now bigger!" (with a price increase) and then repeat.

tantalor

Scunthorpe mentioned!

prvc

Article could have profited by adopting a neutral tone instead of attempting to be comedic. Surely information on historical sizes has not been lost. As for the candy bar market: the ideal outcome for the consumer would be if a single candy bar ended up being a reasonable portion size, priced proportionately to cost to produce.

pavlov

I was surprised to learn the Mars bar familiar from my childhood wasn't a product of the original American corporation Mars Inc. Frank Mars founded the American company. His son Forrest invented Milky Way, but then eventually quarreled with his dad and was removed from the business. Forrest moved to England, founded his own company, and the Mars bar was his first product: a European version of Milky Way. Later he inherited the original American business and merged the UK one into it.

okin

The real question was whether it is still edible 35y later :D

NoDodgeQuestion

paging the worseonpurpose bot to vomit out 3 paragraphs of claudeslop about how private equity stole our chocolate

smolder

Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.

TheAtomic

Food reporting is often framed like this, as if the smaller size was a bad thing, or the price / gram, pound or ounce is the relevant criteria. Esp in the case of candy, you would think smaller sizes would satisfy the other framing for food items, esp in America, that over-sized food leads to obesity. It is a lose-lose framing, with nutritional value completely ignored. Instead, the reporting is always how people are being ripped off or making an unhealthy choice.

JohnTHaller

The modern version replaces a good chunk of the sugar in the old version with corn syrup and adds artificial flavor.

hackthemack

Just my personal anecdata, it took my a while to put a finger on it, but it seemed like something started to change in products in the 90s. Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes. Super huge discount? retail stores opened, that you usually needed a membership card. Walmart started offering the cheapest sourced product from around the world that was often just slightly inferior to what you use to be able to get, or the price on the higher quality item went up while the slightly lower quality item price went down. Washing machines started using all these cheap plastic parts that more easily wear down or break. Electronics started to get added to everything whether it is needed or not, usually for switches where the electronic part is cheaper than the mechanical equivalent. And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.

p0w3n3d

TBH chocolate bar shouldn't be too large because you usually eat it as a whole. But chips, butter, chocolate etc. shouldn't be downsized. It's simply cheating

reaperducer

Mars Bar from 1991 found Is that some kind of achievement? Just look in the ads/coupons in the newspaper archive if you want to see the size of foods in the past. In the United States, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks shrinkflation as part of the Consumer Price Index: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...

jotato

I once read that Hershey has put a calories cap of 250 on a serving of their candy. That jives with what I see on the store shelves. I wonder if Mars did the same thing and perhaps the reduction in size was due (at least in part?) to that.