Cadbury Fun Treats: There’s Nothing Fun About a Half Empty Box

Because it's "fun" to get only a microscopic piece of a chocolate bar . . . 

We didn’t expect a lot of trick-or-treaters in our neighbourhood, so my husband bought a smaller box of chocolate bars that usual. He bought the Cadbury Fun Treats 45 count or 501 grams box.

This box was about a foot tall so it makes it seem as if your 45 chocolate bars might actually be a fairly generous size; they're not.

We left them in the cupboard until Hallowe’en, when I opened the box.

Great a half empty box. That's what every customer wants to see.

What a rip off! The box looked like it was almost empty.

It was half empty. It’s bad enough that Hallowe’en candy is even more of a rip-off then it was when we were children (how much smaller can these chocolate bars get before they’re invisible?), but then Cadbury has to add to that by wasting half a box with empty space (when there is already a bunch of packaging happening since each microscopic bar is already individually wrapped in plastic).

Why would they do this? Is it to deceive customers into thinking there are more chocolate bars than there are? Or that they’re bigger than they are? It certainly isn’t to protect the chocolate bars (as companies claim that “slack fill” protects chips in half empty bags). Whatever the reason, they should just cut this wasteful practice out. Wasting all that cardboard is disgusting. The generation that’s trick-or-treating now will be upset not only with the size of the “fun” sized chocolate bars, but also by the state of the Earth that they inherit. Yes, cardboard is recyclable, but reducing and eliminating waste is better (50% of the box was unnecessary, so 50% of it would not need to be recycled now if it had not been used in the first place and there would have been 50% less resources used on either end, trees, dye, water, energy and then energy to recycle as well as fuel for the recycling trucks and on and on). Recycling takes a lot of resources to do so it shouldn't make us feel that great that something that is waste is recyclable. It would be better to just reduce or eliminate that waste to begin with. Companies that have so many customers who are children should lead by example and reduce their packaging and footprint on the environment to help these young customers have a better future where there might actually be some resources left for them.

And there’s nothing “fun” about a half empty box of candy, Cadbury.

Believe it or not there are 45 "fun" sized chocolate bars in this colander. How much smaller could they get?

New Smarties Packaging is Not So Smart

Yesterday I was at the movies with my mother and we bought a box of Smarties to share. In the darkened movie theatre, we looked at the box of Smarties. "Is this smaller than the boxes used to be?" I asked. "Yes of course it is. Everything is smaller now," my mother replied. She had a point. Pretty much everything is smaller now and more expensive.

Who knew that I was supposed to open the package from the right end and not the left end.

I opened the box and we were both mystified to see that the Smarties were sectioned into three tubes within the box. The sectioning was achieved by extra pieces of cardboard within the box. We could not understand why this was. "Look it's not even full," my mother pointed out. But nothing ever really is (think of that last bag of chips or box of cereal you bought- it wasn't full). This box was only filled to about 3/4 full with Smarties in their three little sections. We had no idea how you would eat the Smarties. Being in three sections would make the Smarties go everywhere if you tried to tip them into your hand. So, we did what my parents always do at the movies and tipped the whole box into the bag of popcorn.

Extra cardboard creates three individual sections for the Smarties to sit in.

I took the box with me home so that I could get a photo of it and that's when I discovered the purpose of the three sections. Turns out that we had opened the box at the wrong end.

Or eat them all at once. I don't need some guilt trip or directive from a package, thank you very much.

The box said "make 'em last." Yeah, right. I don't know anyone who would buy a regular sized box of Smarties and then save them through three different sittings. Sure the calorie content for each section was clearly set out on the box, but who wants to eat just 10 Smarties or so at a time? It's unrealistic and in the process the company has used even more resources in their packaging, ie. extra cardboard.

Door number one.

Door number two.

All three doors open.

I think that this calorie counting packaging experiment should be abandoned by Smarties. I mean at least 50% of people are going to open the package from the wrong end either through inattention or from not being able to see that there is a particular end to open (badly lit movie theatres, lost reading glasses, whatever) and those that do open the package from the right end are most likely just going to eat them all in one go anyways, so it seems like just a waste of packaging. It's overpackaging.