The chaos of our election behind us, let’s now turn to another object of outrage: Toblerone. Indeed, one of the world’s most ubiquitous and identifiable chocolate bars is undergoing a facelift. While the triangular bar has retained its shape, the volume of two of its U.K. bars has been reduced by roughly 10%. Take a wild guess how people reacted?
In a Facebook post, Toblerone explains that the reduction is due to “higher costs for numerous ingredients.” The following statement also appeared on their Facebook page during a (brief) time when they were directly responding to consumers questions:
…we had to make a decision between changing the shape of the bar, and raising the price. We chose to change the shape to keep the product affordable for our customers, and it enables us to keep offering a great value product.
This doesn’t make all that much sense though. Why not simply shorten the bars as opposed to changing how frequently Toblerone’s mighty peaks appear in succession? Also, the value of the product isn’t based on the size of the packaging, it’s based on how much actual product you get for your money. Needing to raise prices in response to increased production costs is an inherently reasonable position for a company to be in: telling customers that the “value” hasn’t changed is not. The new appearance suggests some kind of crazy Willy Wonka-esque theft happened in the factory and it’s not the sort of thing customers are going to miss.
Needless to say, the internet is reacting pretty strongly and has named the unwelcome change “#Tobleronegate”.
Let this be a warning to other candy companies—if you change things, people are going to notice.