Oreos have been an evening ritual for Shane Ransonet for years.
So he was confounded a few months ago when he opened a package and, as had long been his custom, jabbed a fork into a cookie’s creme filling to dunk it into a glass of milk. The cookie broke. Ransonet, a bottled-water salesman in New Iberia, La., showed his wife, Christine, the offending Oreo. Like others in the box, the twin chocolate wafers were smeared with just a thin coat of creme, far less, he said, than the typical blob he was used to.
The couple thought it was a fluke. This fall, they decided to test Double Stuf Oreos, a variety Shane had never cared for—too much creme. This time, he recognized the cookie immediately.
“Here we go, that’s the regular Oreo,” Ransonet, 47, told his wife.
Ransonet is one of throngs of Oreo fans who have been perturbed in recent years by what some feel could be one of the biggest inflation scandals to hit supermarkets to date: “Double Stuf” Oreos with just a normal amount of creme, and even less in the original-sized versions. Some gripe that the filling no longer reaches the wafers’ edges. Others say the cookies now bear little resemblance to the creme-stuffed images on Oreo’s packaging.
Oreos, made by snack giant Mondelez, have long attracted a devout following, making them the world’s best-selling cookie more than a century since their creation. Now, suspicion over subtle changes has prompted some devotees to protest what they believe is the latest cookie conspiracy, or try to suss out the truth about creme.
Some fans are making videos of themselves twisting Oreos open to reveal scant filling. Others touted Hydrox, an Oreo competitor. Beverly Cooper, 60, of Lincoln, Neb., said she and her husband have withstood changes to many of their favorite foods recently, from cereal to ice cream. But finding what appeared to be a downsized dusting of creme in their Double Stuf Oreos last month was the last straw.
“It’s a sign of the times,” Cooper said. “This is the way of the world now.”
On r/shrinkflation, a 100,000-user-strong Reddit forum for consumers aggrieved about all kinds of products, users bemoan the perceived cutback in creme and argue about when it took place.
“Nowadays it’s barely even a sneeze of filling on the cookies.”
“Bought a full pack. EVERY SINGLE ONE had this little cream. I even called my mom to complain about it because I needed to vent it out.” (“Hell yeah, brother, let it out,” came a reply. )
Mondelez said it has used a variety of strategies in recent years to combat higher costs for ingredients such as cocoa and sugar, from raising wholesale prices to scaling back discounts to shrinking package sizes. It hasn’t fought inflation through big changes to its products, the company said, though it welcomes feedback from fans on how to make them better. “We would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we would start to play around with the quality,” said Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put.
Van de Put said Mondelez is always working to improve Oreos, but that it hasn’t messed with the cookie-to-creme ratio. He said Mondelez monitors its brands closely and hasn’t noticed significant creme-related complaints, nor have they affected the $4 billion brand, which sells some 40 billion cookies in more than 100 countries each year.
Oreos have undergone changes in the 111 years since their origin. Nabisco, now owned by Mondelez, removed lard and added vegetable oil in the 1990s, making the cookies kosher. In the 2000s, Nabisco’s then-owner Kraft Foods removed trans fats from Oreos, which involved reformulating their creme.
Lynn Dornblaser, director of innovation and insight at market-research firm Mintel, said a review of regular and Double Stuf Oreos since 2004 found no observable changes in their on-pack ingredient and nutrition statements. She said consumer complaints could reflect manufacturing issues in cookie plants, adding that it’s easy for fans to notice variations in products as specific and precise as Oreos. On a recent day in November, a pack of regular Oreos in Chicago contained cookies that appeared stuffed with varying amounts of creme. Some Double Stuf cookies were similar in width to the fattest regular Oreos but the creme often spread farther to the cookie’s edge.
People have tried to unwind the mysteries of Oreos’ filling before. In 2013, a high-school math teacher in New York spearheaded an effort in his classroom to measure the amount of creme in regular, Double and Mega Stuf Oreos. Double Stuf Oreos came up short, according to the students’ measurements, offering just 1.86 times the creme of a regular Oreo.
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In 2013, a high-school math teacher in New York spearheaded an effort in his classroom to measure the amount of creme in regular, Double and Mega Stuf Oreos. Perception can easily cloud reality, according to food industry analysts and brand experts, who said consumers’ distrust of big companies has grown as inflation has required consumers to pay more for the same amount or less in almost every aspect of their lives. In many cases, price increases have come through stealth changes to products or services, leaving consumers on high alert, analysts said.
Nicholas Fereday, executive director of food and consumer trends for agricultural lender Rabobank, said whether warranted or not, consumers can get particularly feisty when they suspect tinkering with an iconic brand. “It’s crossing the Rubicon,” he said.
Tweaks to Mondelez’s products have provoked outcry in the past. Fans of Toblerone revolted when the company lengthened the gaps between the “peaks” of one of its chocolate bars in the U.K. in 2016. Mondelez blamed the rising cost of ingredients for forcing the changes, which reduced the weight of the bar sold by discount retailers. The company discontinued the lighter bar two years later.
In recent years, the company debuted an Oreo two-pack, a smaller size that costs less but carries a higher profit margin.
David DiLena, a 44-year-old physicist in Ellsworth, Maine, who works on helium recycling, was shocked by how little creme he found in the Double Stuf Oreos he bought this fall. Still, he left room for debate when he uploaded a video to his Facebook page: squeezing the cookie between his fingertips, he spread the dollop of creme in the middle to the edges to reveal a layer no thicker than the wafers themselves.
“Conjecture: a double stuff Oreo is a normal Oreo,” wrote DiLena. “Judge for yourself.”
In Long Island, N.Y., Brandon Grunther, who runs a pro-wrestling podcast, said he wondered “am I going crazy?” after opening a package of Double Stuf Oreos in June. He had just tucked into an afternoon snack when he noticed the creme filling was less thick than he remembered, and its circumference was smaller too. He described his experience on Twitter, now known as X, and tagged Oreo.
Grunther said Mondelez sent him a coupon for a package of Oreos in response, but he hasn’t used it yet—he’s waiting for the release of a new, unusual flavor.
“I appreciated it,” Grunther, 34, said. “Though I definitely would rather just have more creme.”