Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
127 comments
·September 14, 2025nanolith
dfxm12
She's upset that the recipes are different
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
airstrike
Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Blahah
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
tbcj
Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.
zurtri
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
e28eta
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
al_borland
This is very interesting.
I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.
I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
frainfreeze
Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?
Balgair
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
striking
Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
pests
Link for the lazy:
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
AlotOfReading
They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
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charles_f
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
mh-
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
gwd
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
AlotOfReading
Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch.
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.
brian-armstrong
This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
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pessimizer
Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.
SamoyedFurFluff
As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.
rjh29
If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
rimprobablyly
Oh no they don't.
sevensor
Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.
al_borland
That was my sister’s favorite soup as a kid. I ended up having it a lot as a result as well.
WillAdams
I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.
mh-
I think people know you can purchase baking ingredients.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
Xcelerate
Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.
ip26
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
neilv
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
beloch
Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
ceejayoz
Volume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's.
I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
MangoToupe
Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
Thegn
I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
cjensen
The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
Balgair
I mean, also, when was the last time you had your oven properly calibrated? How sure are you that it's actually 350 F?
derefr
IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
jhawk28
Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
Dilettante_
The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
tzs
Or measure flour by weight instead of volume.
karlshea
Flour should be weighed.
Avshalom
Well I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.
gus_massa
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
userbinator
Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.
dmoy
Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
manwe150
Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead
inferiorhuman
Sure you can. Scramble them a bit and weigh them.
Avshalom
I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
beloch
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
brianwawok
I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
iterance
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
neilv
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar you used to buy soap costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
yepitwas
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
vachina
In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.
lbourdages
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
stephen_g
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
dripton
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
apparent
Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
lbourdages
We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
ajsnigrutin
Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.
At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.
Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
kjkjadksj
Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.
UberFly
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
Havoc
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
pluc
Yeah but did you see the yacht it bought?
senkora
This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
estimator7292
The problem with expecting the fairy godmother of the market to fix food is that food is not a product consumers can go without. Sales can't go down.
Sales will, in fact, continue to go up as people now have to buy twice the item count to get the same calories.
The Market is not a benevolent magical entity. It is a machine that only has a single variable: profit.
WaltPurvis
This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
Loughla
Um. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies.
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
kjkjadksj
While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.
ajsnigrutin
Sales of betty crocker mix can go down.
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
relaxing
vanilla and sugar has also shrinkflated
AfterHIA
Shiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.
declan_roberts
When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are.
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
ksenzee
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
al_borland
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
twodave
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
roxolotl
You can actually buy stuff like that if you really want to keep a mix on hand.
The King Arthur powders are great:
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m...
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow...
And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter:
ip26
The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.
cbhl
Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be:
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.