Melting away You might have thought that it is too difficult to shop carefully enough to avoid the "hidden" grocery price increases delivered when manufacturers shrink their packages. Who would notice a half-ounce reduction in the size of a package of crackers?
Well, there's good news, sort of. Now some manufacturers are hacking off large-enough chunks that the decrease is visible to the naked eye -- perhaps alerting you to the possibility of choosing another brand.
Example: Some national brands of "premium" ice cream, including Edy's and Breyers, have reduced those packages from 1.75 quarts (56 ounces) to 1.5 quarts (48 ounces). That's two 1/2-cup servings -- a whopping 14 percent -- less. So far, at least, such Midwest brands as Kemps and Blue Bunny have not followed suit, and you can see the difference easily: The smaller packages are much thinner.
Ring in the new Yes, Mr. Tidbit had sort of promised not to report on every new Oreo item from Nabisco. But then he saw the new Oreo Fudge Rings -- "white fudge striped cookies."
As with many Oreoid products, Fudge Rings don't look much like regular Oreos. Most notably, they aren't sandwich cookies. Each is a single flat chocolate (Oreoish) cookie, larger than an Oreo, but with a hole in the middle, and topped with a considerable drizzle of that "white fudge," which is much more like firm icing than the white filling of a regular Oreo.
Each Fudge Ring weighs less than a regular Oreo (a serving of three is 26 grams; three regular Oreos total 34 grams); nonetheless a bag of 30 Oreo Rings (9.6 ounces) costs the same as an 18-ounce (45 cookies) bag of regular Oreos -- that's 87 percent more per ounce. Please tell Mr. Tidbit you weren't surprised.
AL SICHERMAN
