Small is beautiful, said economist E. F. Schumaker. That may be, but big is better say customers of FMCG brands. It’s not just a modern phenomenon but a modern trade phenomenon.

In the post-covid scenario, consumers prefer more value and are shifting increasingly to bigger packs in most categories. From soaps to  shampoos, packaged atta to processed foods and from biscuits to beverages. Bigger packs aka family packs now account for 75% of total sales at Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar outlets, up from 57% a year and half back. Same is the story in other modern retail outlets as well.

Bigger packs are 25% cheaper than regular packs and they offer much higher profit margins than smaller packs. With rising input costs and the difficulty of increasing prices of smaller packs, its no surprise FMCG firms are focusing more on bigger packs. Apart from higher margins, bigger packs offer savings in manufacturing, packaging and transportation costs. Moreover, the bigger size allows the packs to look like small-sized hoardings on the retail shelves thus attracting shopper’s attention.

Amidst all these rational and functional reasons for the preference of bigger packs, it’s the larger quantity of those packs and its ability to make customers consume more that should interest marketers. Bigger packs make customers consume more without them realizing it.

Consumer Behaviour professor Brian Wansik conducted an experiment in a Chicago theatre in which movie goers were given a free bucket of popcorn. Half the movie goers received a big bucket and half received a medium-sized one. But there was one thing common between the two groups. The popcorn they were given was five days old and hence very stale. It even squeaked when eaten!

Did the customers throw away the bucket?

Eventually, yes. Only after both the groups ate most of it. But there was one significant difference. People who were given the big bucket ate about 53% more popcorn even though they didn’t like it. They were asked if they have eaten more because of the size of their bucket. They denied it!

The more you are given, the more you consume. Irrespective of how bad it is. Period!

If you think that would have been a freak occurrence or maybe the movie so good that made people forgot about the staleness, here’s another study done by Wansik a few years later.

Wansik made people sit down to a large bowl of tomato soup and were told to drink it as much as they wanted. Unbeknownst to them, the soup bowls were designed to refill themselves with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table. No matter how much they consumed, they could never empty the bowl. Many kept drinking the soup without realizing they were consuming a lot of it. They would have been in a real soup if Wansik had not ended the experiment!

The moral of the story needs no iteration. Large plates, large bowls and large packages mean more eating, more drinking and more consumption. Advantage marketers!

Do you think all this eating is mindless? Maybe that’s why Brian Wansik wrote a book about this and titled it……Mindless Eating!