No one's saying they're good for you, but you know where you stand with old-fashioned chocolate bars. They fill a snack-sized hole: unwrap, chomp, get on with your life. They are, however, yesterday's news. These days, it's all about Bitsa Wispa, Galaxy Bits and Aero Bubbles - bite-size versions of the treats we know and love in large pouches. Trouble is, these packets hold around three times as much chocolate as the originals.
Chocolate bags, as the new genre is called, "are one of the most successful categories within the sector," says Tony Bilsborough, spokesperson for Cadbury. They're now worth, he explains, more than £300m across all brands in the UK and sales have been growing at more than 5% in recent months. "I think this is a consequence of the growth of the big night in," he adds, the implication being that the bags are for sharing.
They certainly make for a tempting purchase, but their appeal is riddled with those little contradictions we turn a blind eye to when we're feeling greedy. Each piece seems harmlessly minute, even compared with the fun-size bars of old. But unlike the fun-sizes, minis are unwrapped, facilitating, as Hershey Co puts it, "faster hand-to-mouth-eating". And while you might previously have avoided bigger bags in case you accidentally scoffed the lot yourself, Cadbury's offerings, which also include Twirl Bites and Caramel Nibbles, come with plastic zips so, you know, if you have super-human willpower, you can close the bag after a few mouthfuls and save some for later.
Resealability, says Mintel senior global packaging analyst Benjamin Punchard, gives a feeling of choice to the consumer. "Whether it's something they really want or brands are using it to hide behind, to say: 'We're not giving people large portions,' that's another question." Bilsborough maintains that Cadbury wouldn't recommend eating the whole bag in one sitting and the zip affords portion control.
However, Yale university psychologist Andrew Geier is convinced that large bags of unwrapped chocolate bites are another example of portion inflation – a term he says no longer captures the urgency of the situation: "I've taken lately to calling it portion derangement." If these bags were truly aimed at sharing, he argues, the sweets would be individually wrapped to make them hygienic.
Studies have shown that placing the smallest of obstacles between us and unhealthy foods can cut consumption of them. In 2011, psychologist Paul Rozin, from the University of Pennsylvania, showed that by making certain foods at a salad bar slightly harder to reach, consumption of them fell by between 8 and 16%. And last year, Geier gave students tubes of crisps to chomp while they watched TV. In some packs red markers were dotted periodically through the stacked crisps, and in others, there were none. The subjects whose crisps were divided ate less than half as much as the others. "You didn't even have to unwrap something," Geier says, "you just had to remove the segment. I think that is less invasive than individual wrapping."
These miniature sizes in big bags create serious portion confusion, too. When dealing with bits of food that are less than a portion, says Geier, people tend to lose track of how much they're eating. After his crisps experiment, the participants whose stacks were loosely divided into portions had a much better grasp on how much, and how many calories, they had eaten than those whose weren't. "I don't blame the food companies for wanting to sell more food", says Geier, "but don't tell us you're trying to get us to eat less."
