Shrinking Grocery Items May Hide Price Hikes : Packaging: Lighter or shorter containers may hold less product. Some manufacturers said consumers requested smaller portions.

Reduced Contents! Same Price!

Chances of finding such language on any of your favorite brands at the market are slim, but in the last year, the processors of StarKist tuna, Knorr soups, Brim coffee and other familiar grocery items have quietly reduced product weight or volume without changing the container size or the price.

A number of government and consumer groups say that such unannounced changes are deceptive because the customer is paying a higher price without knowing it. This, they add, comes at a time when people can least afford it and need to shop around for the best price.

“It’s a surreptitious way of raising the price without having to actually have to put a new price tag on the product. I regard it as a sneaky and misleading,” said Mark Green of New York City’s Consumer Affairs Department.

The manufacturers point to surveys showing that consumers requested smaller portions or that technological innovations lightened the product without reducing the number of servings.

Some of the contents-reduced products:

* Knorr brand leek soup and recipe mix. The old, smaller box held enough dry mix to make four 8-ounce servings. The new, bigger box contains enough to make only three 8-ounce servings.

* StarKist’s 6 1/2-ounce can now contains just 6 1/8 ounces of tuna. The can was shortened by 1/16 inch and the price was not changed.

* General Foods puffed up its Brim coffee beans so that 11 1/2 ounces now fill the can, which used to hold 12 ounces.

* Lipton’s instant lemon-flavored tea was lightened from 4 ounces to 3.7 ounces without changing the container’s size.

Most manufacturers refused to discuss prices, but a spokeswoman for the 70 Shaw’s Supermarkets, a New England chain based in East Bridgewater, Mass., said that “in all these instances prices stayed the same, even though the net weight of the product was decreased.”

There are variations on that theme. The new box of Kellogg NutriGrain wheat cereal trumpets the product’s “New Larger Size.” The box’s volume has grown nearly 15%, but the amount of cereal in the box increased less than 2%.

The moves are not considered illegal because in all these products, the volumes and weights are declared as required by law.

Tim Knowlton of Kellogg Co., based in Battle Creek, Mich., termed the changes in boxes of NutriGrain wheat “a quality issue.” He said the cereal flakes needed more space so they would not be crushed.

CPC International Inc. said that it increased the depth of its Knorrs leek soup box by half an inch last March, when it began packaging its soups in the United States. Machinery capacity made the change necessary, a spokesman said.

The decreased weight was a response to “a lot of complaints from American consumers that we were giving them too much in the box,” said Nina Henderson, president of CPC Specialty Products Inc., the Englewood Cliffs, N.J., division managing Knorr products.

StarKist Seafood Co. of Long Beach, Calif., uses a similar argument. It said a reduction in water accounted for two-thirds of the weight reduction, and a survey found that consumers preferred less water in their tuna.

Marketing experts say that if the manufacturers were so intent on meeting consumer preferences, they would have advertised the weight reductions on their labels.

“These sound to me like a strained explanation,” said Stephen Greyser, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School. “I would characterize it as a way to increase margins at the expense of the consumer.”

Both General Foods Corp. and Thomas J. Lipton Inc. said that reformulations--of Brim coffee and Lipton instant lemon-flavored tea--allowed the number of servings to remain the same although the package is lighter.

The weight-reduction strategy, experts add, typically is used in hard times as a way for companies to bolster profits without raising prices.

To StarKist, which says it sells 518.4 million cans of tuna annually, an eighth of an ounce tuna reduction adds up to a savings of 4 million pounds of fish a year.

“More consumers these days are price-minded in their shopping,” said Greyser. “If you can’t hold the price in its own terms, you can hold it by dint of reducing contents.”