Bad News for Chocolate Lovers
Iconic Finnish brand reduces portions but no cut in prices.
The Finnish confectionary company Fazer has noticeably reduced the size of its standard bars, such as Geisha, but prices will remain the same, in a move which may irritate chocolate-lovers already threatened with a special tax on confectionary.
Relaunched with a sign translating roughly as, ‘New, nicely smaller size,’ the amount of chocolate has fallen from 45g to about 36g. However Fazer’s head of marketing, Hammidi Farid, insists that this is not a duplicitous way of raising the bar’s price while seeming not to.
‘Our current form was launched in 2001-2,’ he told 65DN. ‘At the time it seemed like a good mould. But we had complaints that it’s too chunky, too big and that when you snap a piece of you have to rotate it by half to snap another bit off . . . one of our customers was very specific!’
‘Only now has it been possible to make alterations and reduce the size and change the shape,’ he continued. ‘It is 80 percent because of this. But it is kind of a coincidence that we’ve done it when there is this concern about weight and health and also the price of cocoa has increased a lot. So the change has allowed us to keep the price at the level the consumers want . . . though we don’t set the shop price.’
‘But this was not the key issue,’ Mr Farid added.
