Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and so is the annual rush to buy or give away boxes of classic Russell Stover and Whitman’s Sampler chocolates, available for under $12 at Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, and Target.
But this year, shoppers may be disappointed when they open the big red or pink heart-shaped boxes, according to a consumer advocate. That’s because packaging is misleading, says Edgar Dworsky, a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general and editor of ConsumerWorld.org.
Dvorsky said his research showed that boxes that are too large can fool consumers into believing they have more chocolate when they actually don’t.
Consumer watchdogs call this tactic “relaxing,” and federal law doesn’t allow it. Regulators assess the availability of a product in abundance by comparing the capacity of a package to the amount of product it actually contains, he said. They then determine whether the extra space is inefficient and serves no legitimate purpose, such as product protection.
This is different from the phenomenon of “deflation”, the practice of packaging products that often occurs when inflation rises sharply and companies’ costs rise. To control these costs, companies packaged products to look smaller, lighter, and adorned with less decorative colors.
A few days ago, Dworsky says, a reader alerted him to a box of chocolates and sent him evidence of a box containing samples of Whitman’s heart-shaped chocolates.
The box measures 9.3 inches wide, 10 inches high, and has a net weight of 5.1 ounces. “It’s a pretty good size,” Dvorsky said. But when the box was opened, there were 11 chocolates inside.
So Dvorsky bought several boxes of this year’s Whitman ($7.99 each) and removed all of the inner packaging material and liners. “Chocolate bars only take up a third of the box.”
Dvorsky has no evidence that the brand is actually saving on chocolate compared to previous years. But CNN found a box of Russell Stover heart-shaped chocolates with an expiration date of June 10, 2006, kept by one of our employees as a keepsake, and it was the same size: 9 inches wide and 10 inches high.
Dvorsky also found a 5.1-ounce heart-shaped Russell Stover chocolate bar containing nine bars. “It’s almost twice the size of a 4-ounce Russell Stover box of seven,” he said.
“Imagine that you received a large box. If you give it to your loved one for Valentine’s Day, they’ll think it’s a big box of chocolates, but it’s actually only nine,” he says. “so awful.”
Both brands indicate on the packaging the weight and the approximate number of candies inside. Lindt & Sprüngli, the Swiss chocolate company that owns the Russell Stover, Whitman’s and Ghirardelli brands, sent a request for comment to Russell Stover Chocolates.
Russell Stover Chocolates stated that it “can clearly tell our customers what’s in our packaging.”
“This includes the weight distribution of the products as well as the amount of chocolates in all of our Valentine’s Day boxes,” Patrick Khattak, the brand’s vice president of marketing, said in an email to CNN Business.
In the past, regulators have prosecuted chocolate makers for allegedly deceptive packaging. In 2019, the California District Attorney filed a lawsuit against Russell Stover and Ghirardelli, alleging that they used false bottoms and other deception in some boxes and bags of chocolate to make the packages look fuller than they really were.
District attorneys, including the Santa Cruz District Attorney, settled the case and the companies paid a $750,000 fine, admitting no wrongdoing but agreeing to change the packaging.
Santa Cruz Assistant District Attorney Edward Brown said he was investigating recent examples of possible fraudulent packaging by the two companies. He said that Dvorsky had asked him about his most famous reporting on Russell Stover and Whitman’s boxes of chocolates.
“Unfortunately, this is still going on. It’s also disappointing,” Brown told CNN. “We will investigate whether these companies have taken advantage of any exceptions to the law. Since our case in 2019, many exceptions have been added that undermine the rules.”
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Post time: Sep-05-2023
