A new survey puts a hard number on something FMCG founders have been feeling for a while: shrink the pack instead of raising the price, and shoppers notice anyway — and they leave. 56% of American shoppers say they've stopped buying certain brands entirely because of shrinkflation. Not grumbled. Not complained on social media. Stopped. Quietly, permanently, and usually without telling the brand why.

56% of US shoppers have stopped buying a brand because of shrinkflation. 67% say it's changed how they see brands they used to trust. 85% believe brands overuse "inflation" as an excuse.

The data comes from a Cint survey run for Omnisend — 1,075 US shoppers, part of a wider sample of 4,000-plus across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, fielded in March 2026 with a margin of error of ±3%. Alongside the 56% brand-abandonment figure, 65% of respondents named groceries as the category where shrinkflation is most obvious, and 67% said rising prices and shrinking packs together had changed how they see brands they used to trust. The number that should really land with any FMCG owner: 85% believe brands and retailers are overusing "it's inflation" as a justification for price and size changes that go beyond what's actually necessary. Shoppers aren't naive about cost pressure. They're just done being told a story that doesn't match what they can see on the shelf.

I understand the appeal. Raising a shelf price means a conversation — with the retailer's buyer, with the customer, sometimes with your own sales team who have to defend it. Shrinking the pack by a few grams, or quietly reformulating with a cheaper input, means no conversation at all. The price stays the same. The margin comes back. Nobody has to sit across a table and justify anything.

That's exactly what makes it the more expensive option, not the cheaper one. A visible price rise gives the customer a reason, even one they don't love. A silent shrink gives them nothing — just a slowly building sense that something's off, until the day they do the maths at the shelf or read a headline about it, and the trust doesn't come back with an apology. It comes back, if it comes back at all, with the customer buying somewhere else for months while you wonder why volume is soft and nobody complained.

A national brand with a marketing budget can absorb a bad shrinkflation news cycle. An SME FMCG brand usually can't — it doesn't have the reserve of goodwill or the media spend to out-shout the story. Worse, the retailer notices before the customer does. Pack-size and weight changes get flagged in range reviews and category audits, and a supplier who's quietly resized without warning the buyer risks a much harder conversation than the one they were avoiding — one about whether they still deserve the space at all. And every trust-eroding shrink move hands private label an easier sell: a store-brand alternative sitting right next to yours, at a size and price the shopper can actually compare, run by a retailer who isn't hiding anything.

The mistake isn't choosing between a price rise and a smaller pack. Sometimes a smaller pack, a reformulation, or a repositioned SKU is genuinely the right commercial call. The mistake is making that call reactively, under pressure, without a plan for whether or how to tell anyone. What I build with clients instead is a value-change process, decided before the pressure hits:

A cost-trigger threshold that forces a formal pricing-and-format review the moment input costs move past it — so the decision happens on a schedule, not in a panic. A standing rule for what gets communicated and how, matched to the size of the change: a genuine reformulation gets a "new recipe" story on-pack, a pack-size change gets called out rather than buried, and nothing goes out the door that a customer could reasonably feel misled by. And one person accountable for making the call — not a decision that happens by default because finance changed a spec sheet and nobody in marketing or sales was in the room.

Done this way, a value change becomes a story you tell on your own terms — and 85% of shoppers already believe most brands aren't telling it straight, which means the brand that actually does gets remembered for it. Done the other way, it's a story your customers tell about you, on a shelf you no longer control.

This is exactly the kind of decision the Simple-Growth System™ is built to take out of the founder's gut and put into a repeatable process — so pricing, packaging, and reformulation calls get made on data and a clear communication rule, not on nerve and hope. If your last cost-pressure decision was made in a scramble, or you're not sure how the next one will be handled, that's exactly where a Simple-Growth coaching engagement starts. Get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith at Simple-Growth to build the value-change system your business should have had before this year's cost pressure hit.