Shrinkflation legality overview in Europe
- Mondelēz ruling suggests shrinkflation can mislead despite accurate weight labelling
- EU law currently requires accurate net quantity but not prominent packaging changes
- Courts increasingly assess overall consumer perception rather than strict labelling compliance
- National laws in France and Italy now require clearer shrinkflation disclosures
- Shrinkflation laws are not tightening universally but scrutiny and regulation are increasing
Shrinkflation can get companies into trouble.
This was seen recently when a court in Germany found that Mondelēz International, the US snacking giant, had misled its consumers by reducing the size of Milka bars from 100g to 90g without sufficiently changing the packaging.
Here’s the catch: the company had changed the bar’s weight labelling to accurately reflect its weight, yet the court argued in its ruling that this was not enough to avoid deception. Consumers, it said, cannot be expected to regularly check packaging information on the off chance that the manufacturer has changed the product’s weight if there is no other indication that the product is different.
Does this case reflect general rules around shrinkflation? Do companies now have to do more to let their consumers know about size reductions?
What is shrinkflation?
Shrinkflation is, essentially, the reduction of the size of a product without a corresponding reduction in price.
The reduction of a product’s size is often unaccompanied by a meaningful change in its packaging, except of course for weight labelling, meaning that these changes are not always noticed by consumers.
“What we call shrinkflation occurs when the content of a packaging is reduced while the packaging itself looks more or less the same as before,” says Christopher Eggers, partner at the law firm Squire Patton Boggs.
The key question that the Mondelēz case brings to the fore is whether a company must change its packaging significantly in order to avoid landing in legal hot water.
How much should companies change packaging?
For consumer clarity, companies should ideally draw people’s attention to changes in packaging, says Katia Merten-Lentz, partner at law firm Food Law Science and Partners. Weight information is not something that consumers often pay attention to, especially compared to other elements such as nutritional value, origin and ingredients.
However, legally, such things are not entirely necessary in most of the EU. Under current EU law, manufacturers are required to present the accurate information around the ‘net quantity’ of the food (grams for solids, litres for liquids) in a minimum font size.
“In theory, as long as the declared weight accurately reflects the actual content of the product and all mandatory labelling requirements are complied with, it is difficult to argue that consumers are being misled,” says Merten-Lentz.
The Mondelēz ruling, she says, “was less about formal compliance with labelling rules and more about the overall consumer perception created by the packaging and presentation of the product”.
While there have only been a handful of other cases such as the one in Hamburg, the issue is attracting intense public debate and heightened scrutiny from consumer protection organisations, explains Squire Patton Boggs’ Eggers.
On top of this, Europe’s attitude towards shrinkflation is changing, both on a national and EU-wide level.
Europe’s changing stance on shrinkflation
There is no Europe-wide law on shrinkflation, explains Bregt Raus, managing associate at law firm Altius.
However, anti-shrinkflation legislation is beginning to pop up on a national level in some countries, such as Italy and France.
In 2024, France specified that companies must inform consumers for a period of two months if a product’s price has increased relative to its weight.
In 2025, a similar law entered into force in Italy. This law states that products must be labelled to inform the consumer in the event of a size reduction. In Italy’s case, the country adopted the law without properly notifying the European Commission.
Belgium’s consumer protection minister, Rob Beenders, has also expressed interest in tackling the issue.
The upcoming Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), Europe’s regulation on packaging, could also make shrinkflation more difficult.
The regulation explicitly prohibits the use of double walls (when cardboard packaging has two layers), false bottoms (partitions in packaging aiming to make the product look larger than it is) or unnecessary layers, except in exceptional circumstances.
Even where rules are not in place, approaches to the issue are evolving. The Mondelēz ruling was part of a wider trend; courts and consumer authorities are increasingly focusing on the overall impression products give consumers through packaging and presentation of products, rather than formal compliance with labelling rules, Food Law Science and Partners’ Merten-Lentz explains.
Europe’s stance on shrinkflation continues to evolve, as consumer protection organisations, local courts and even national lawmakers push for guardrails around the practice. As of now, however, the logic around the Mondelēz ruling will not be universally applied.
