Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?
It's just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Betty Crocker does shrinkflation and you go after the consumer. Way to blame the victim there.
Do you have, in your cupboards, the ingredients to make a German chocolate cake, a pecan cake, and a carrot cake? No? Why not? Swap any of of those for a spice cake, or angel food, or gingerbread... You can't!?!? Why not? A trip to the store and have exactly what I need to make any or all of those. I don't have to pay for extra ingredients that are just going to sit, take up space, and go bad. Do you know how much it would cost to buy all the unique ingredients to make any of those cakes? And you used to get a reliable result too for look, taste, quantity, and quality. But with shrinkflation, that's gone out the door.
Also, ignoring the fact, so many recipes start with a box from Betty Crocker, and then using something they do regularly have at home and use, they add their own little twist on it. Or just use one of those boxes as a base because not everyone has that stuff sitting around or even has the space to store it.
Lastly, flour is one of the most dangerous ingredients to have just sit around in terms of food safety.
But yeah, shame the customer....
The reason for having to add an egg, milk, or some other simple ingredient is because the mix companies found out people were more willing to adopt these mixes if there was a step where they had to do something beyond just adding water. Or at least this is what they told me on the Jiffy Mix factory tour as a child.
They didn't do a study or anything. There was a prevailing theory at the time those mixes were first created that women have an inherent desire to do cooking stuff and since they figured women would be the main ones shopping for food items, they had to add more cooking actions to trick them into buying their products.
Frozen dinners have similar ploys by adding unnecessary stirring steps to the microwave directions.
Boxed baking mixes sell better if they still require eggs to be added. Makes people feel like they're actually baking, as opposed to the just-add-water stuff
It's brain dead easy cooking and people that do it were probably taught by their parents to.
Restaurants do it all the time. Imagine the cake you really like at that one place. Now imagine that it's literally just Betty Crocker.
I learned this first hand at my very first job at 16 and I've never looked at fast food the same way since. The fast food in question is a well-known regional chain, as large McDonald's. Places like McDonald's have their own dedicated supply chain.
There are thousands of recipes sites on the internet with dead simple recipes, especially for cookies. Baking from scratch has never been easier to do.
Also the good recipes tell you the weight of the can, if using cans (almost always seems to be things like whole peeled tomatoes or chipotle chilies in adobo)
This explains everything.
I made some things from hand me down recipes recently that I had memorized and they seemed a bit off. So I dug up the recipes (a can of this and a container of that) and assumed that I was going insane.
These c°ck$uck!ng m0th3rf^ck€r$… Grrr!
Okay but some of my favorite people in life have been cock suckers. Which is why I hate it as a pejorative.
Everyone I know has an asshole, yet here we are...
Its kinda weird to read she was dissappointed because the recipe was "passed down" by her mother. If its a box mix you add like eggs and water to how much 'recipe' is there to pass down? Its not quite the same as a full recipe that uses a certain brand spice mix for a base or something, the box is the recipe.
This isn't about the instructions on the box. There are other recipes that make use of box mixes as base ingredients.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. Is measuring things out in grams and mixing the ingredients too complicated? Americans rely too much on corporate ultra-processed food and then get angry when they get shafted.
To this point, you can make cake mix. It's flour, sugar, leavening agents or yeast / baking powder, salt, and anti-clumping agents / preservatives.
Just take 10 minutes and mix that shit together yourself and leave out the preservatives. You'll get a better cake and recipe worth passing down.
I blame processed food manufacturers for turning cookbooks from instruction manuals into marketing vehicles. A recipe that requires 2 eggs, 450g of flour and Uncle Whizbang's Special Baking Powder(tm) is an ad, and not a recipe.
For this reason I've started collecting vintage cookbooks that are actual culinary manuals, and not advertising that you pay for.
I get what you are saying, because a lot of those recipes were magazine ads or from the package themselves, but name brand does sometimes help.
Trying to make some recipes from the UK in North America was a challenge, because self rising flour brand Y is different than self rising flour brand X.
And if you counter with "just make your own self rising flour" Then you have to check is it Canadian Flour or American Flour, because the Canadian Flour has much higher protein and absorbs more water. And the rising agents vary.
But those "recipes" fall apart if the brand changes internal ingredients.
Because of this I won't buy any box mixes anymore - they were almost always overpriced for what you got and didn't contain anything magical... They just made things simpler. I'll make my cakes and cookies from scratch now and save a fortune.
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It would be better if other recipes adjusted accordingly.
The Zatarans Jambalaya box still says to add a pound of smoked sausage. But those sausages went down to 14oz. Then 12oz. Now some are 10oz. The box still says to add a pound. It’s becoming a hotdog/bun situation.
Now I want to re-watch Father of the Bride.
I haven't made Zatarans Jambalaya in years but I remember having this exact problem. I would have to use like 1 1/3 packages of sausage and end up with 2/3 of a sausage leftover
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