It takes a certain kind of drive, technical know-how, and a fair helping of curiosity to make a data scientist like Adam Williamson.
And Williamson, who calls himself the Price Check Guy on TikTok, reckons that something curious is going on with the ingredients in some supermarket staples.
He claimed that since 2022, Woolworths-brand “tuna in oil” has gone from being made from 70 per cent tuna – down to just 65 per cent.
He’s right. So we asked Woolworths why they made the change.
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A spokesperson said the reduction of tuna was to improve the taste, and insisted that the changes had been popular with customers.
”To ensure the most delicious taste possible for customers, Woolworths reviews ingredients used in our own brand products from time to time,” a Woolworths spokesperson said.
“In 2023, following feedback we improved our tuna range, providing a better mix of oil and tuna meat and it’s proved very popular with customers ever since.”
Williamson says his data suggested the practice of reducing key ingredients in products could be widespread.
By accessing a 2022 version of the Woolworths website, his video shows that a can of tuna in oil contained “Skipjack Tuna (70%), Oil (21%) (Sunflower Oil, Olive Oil), Water, Salt”.
A check of the Woolworths website today shows the same item, with the same weight, has the following ingredients: “Skipjack Tuna (65%), Vegetable Oils (21%), Water, Salt”.
Williamson said his audience later realised that the type of oil had changed as well, from sunflower and olive oil to cheaper vegetable oils.
It’s understood that supermarkets use vegetable oils to ensure security in the supply chains.
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Williamson started his project to track the price changes the major supermarkets made in their everyday items.
As his audience grew, more commenters were flagging “shrinkflation” on everyday items – the process where the weight or size of each item shrinks while the price stays the same.
“I started to look throughout the history and all the obvious ones sort of popped up,” Williamson told 9news.com.au.
He mentioned the well-known shrinking chocolate bars, for one.
“Then I started to look at the ingredient lists and the percentage of those key ingredients,” he said.
He wrote an algorithm that can automatically check how the percentage of key ingredients has changed over time.
“It very quickly started to highlight a number of different products floating to the top,” Williamson said.
“It’s saying hey, hold on, that used to have 70 per cent tuna, and now it’s 65 per cent.”
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And it’s not just chocolate and tuna.
“There are examples where I’ve seen fruit spreads that had 55 per cent of the key ingredients, or strawberry spread, apricot or blueberry,” he said.
Williamson said in some cases, the key ingredient had gone down closer to 50 per cent.
He also mentioned that microwave meals were often flagged by his algorithm.
Williamson hopes to roll the program out soon so the public can access a weekly report on shrinkflation at both Woolworths and Coles.
Some changes to products are obvious – like reductions in product weight or changes to the cost.
“But when the ingredients have been swapped out, that’s when this shrinkflation gets really interesting,” Williamson said.
By his estimate, Woolworths stocks about 25,000 different products, with Coles selling about 20,000.
It would be tough for the average person to keep track of any changes, but using the digital archive website the Wayback Machine to access older versions of the supermarket’s website could make it easy.
“The internet doesn’t forget,” Williamson said.
“I’ve been building pipelines to get that data automatically, and just constantly check these because people have a right to know.
“I think it’s important that we have that symmetry between the retailers and the consumers.
“We both know what’s going to be taken out of our products.”
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