A British woman’s discovery of an “enormous,” decades-old Mars bar has become an internet phenomenon and is prompting a discussion about “shrinkflation.”
Victoria Gordon, owner of Pocket Rockets specialist cleaning company, said she was cleaning the apartment of an elderly woman, whom she referred to as a hoarder, on Aug. 5. Among the hundreds of boxes in the woman’s spare bedroom, she found the old Mars bar, which had an expiry date of 1991.
“Nobody had been in the bedroom for years, absolutely floor to ceiling with boxes and bags, and it took us two days to clear the whole room,” Gordon said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday from Lincoln, England.
She said the Mars bar in one of the boxes caught her attention.
“As I lifted it out of the box, it was literally the size of my hand,” she said. “It was enormous.”
Gordon said she initially threw away the Mars bar after posting a video of it on TikTok. But she had second thoughts and decided to keep the unlikely treasure. The video, titled “How big is this Mars Bar from 1991,” attracted more than 40,000 likes and more than 1,500 comments.
The old chocolate bar was 62.5 grams, 56 per cent heavier than today’s 40-gram product. Gordon said people are noticing that similar products are being sold in smaller packages.
“(The) price of everything’s increasing all the time. We’re getting squeezed and squeezed more,” she said. “(The) cost of living is going up.”
Due to the massive interest, she shared a second video comparing the size of the 35-year-old Mars bar to today’s treat.
Cost pressures, supply chains reason for size change: Mars Inc.
Gordon said she believes the discovery drew so much attention because “people are really disgruntled about shrinkflation.”
“But even I was surprised about the size difference,” Gordon said. “I knew that they were getting smaller and smaller, but I don’t think, until I saw them side by side, I realized just quite how much difference it was.”
CTVNews.ca asked Mars Inc., the U.S. manufacturer of Mars, Snickers, Skittles, Twix and other sweets, why the Mars bar sizes were significantly smaller today.
“Like many food manufacturers, we continue to navigate unprecedented cost pressures across our operations and global supply chains,” Mars Inc. said in an email Tuesday, adding that the chocolate bar’s recipe remains “completely unchanged.”
“Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors, such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa.”
Gordon, whose company also provides cleaning services for crime and post-death scenes, drug paraphernalia sites and other biohazards, said she typically throws out many items that she finds, but she plans to keep the chocolate bar for now.
“The Mars bar seems to be intact, so maybe someone could do a scientific experiment on it,” she said.
“I don’t know see if it is edible. I don’t want to be the one to try it though.”
