30 May 2013 The trend to bite-sized chocs in bags

Chocolate bags, as the new genre is called, “are one of the most successful categories within the sector,” says Tony Bilsborough, spokesperson for Cadbury.

They’re now worth, he explains, more than £300m across all brands in the UK and sales have been growing at more than 5% in recent months. “I think this is a consequence of the growth of the big night in,” he adds, the implication being that the bags are for sharing.

They certainly make for a tempting purchase, but their appeal is riddled with those little contradictions, and this new trend for smaller snacks could be a big problem for people’s waistlines, argues Amy Fleming, writing in The Guardian.

“No one’s saying they’re good for you, but you know where you stand with old-fashioned chocolate bars. They fill a snack-sized hole: unwrap, chomp, get on with your life. They are, however, yesterday’s news… These days, it’s all about large pouches. Trouble is, these packets hold around three times as much chocolate as the originals,” she writes.

“Each piece seems harmlessly minute, even compared with the fun-size bars of old. But unlike the fun-sizes, minis are unwrapped, facilitating, as Hershey Co puts it, ‘faster hand-to-mouth-eating’. And while you might previously have avoided bigger bags in case you accidentally scoffed the lot yourself, Cadbury’s offerings, which also include Twirl Bites and Caramel Nibbles, come with plastic zips so, you know, if you have super-human willpower, you can close the bag after a few mouthfuls and save some for later.”

Resealability, says Mintel senior global packaging analyst Benjamin Punchard, gives a feeling of choice to the consumer. “Whether it’s something they really want or brands are using it to hide behind, to say: ‘We’re not giving people large portions,’ that’s another question.”

Bilsborough maintains that Cadbury wouldn’t recommend eating the whole bag in one sitting and the zip affords portion control.

However, Yale university psychologist Andrew Geier is convinced that large bags of unwrapped chocolate bites are another example of portion inflation – a term he says no longer captures the urgency of the situation. He calls it “portion derangement.” If these bags were truly aimed at sharing, he argues, the sweets would be individually wrapped to make them hygienic.

He maintains these miniature sizes in big bags create serious portion confusion, too.

When dealing with bits of food that are less than a portion, says Geier, people tend to lose track of how much they’re eating.  “I don’t blame the food companies for wanting to sell more food”, says Geier, “but don’t tell us you’re trying to get us to eat less.”

Source: The Guardian