Trading Standards

What you told us

The Shrinkflation and Excess Packaging project ran from 17th of November to the 12th of December. During this time our officers visited premises across Aberdeenshire, and we were delighted to hear from Aberdeenshire residents directly. You told us your main concerns in the local area were:

• Smaller potions being sold in supermarkets; in particular, staple goods such as mince.
• Manufacturers reducing the size of sweet and confectionary products but charging higher costs for them. As expected, larger gift confectionary such as Celebrations and Quality Street was a common theme in the feedback!
• Supermarkets still using excess plastic packaging on fruit and vegetables. One individual also fed back concerns to us that the shelf life on such products now seems to be shorter.
• Some respondents highlighted cat food specifically; with complaints over small portion sizes, excessive packaging, dangerous choking hazards in said packaging.
• Online retailers such as Amazon shipping goods in excessively large boxes.

What we're doing

The survey responses will be combined with input from other such projects and enforcement initiatives to shape our plan of work for the 2025-2026 year. As such, some of this feedback may be used to expand upon and run initiatives to tackle issues which we can directly address or raise consumer awareness on problems we are unable to tackle.

In addition to the visits already completed by officers as part of the project, we also followed up on every premises highlighted to us as a concern. For any premises located outside Aberdeenshire, we passed the details to the relevant local authority’s Trading Standards team so they could make contact on our behalf.