I don’t think that it’s always fraud to reduce the weight of an item. Similar to how I don’t think it’s always fraud to change the price of an item. You do have the responsibility to consider what you’re purchasing.
There is something I don’t like about it though. I think the companies price point for their goods is probably well considered to get the kind of demand and sales they’re hoping for. I think just reducing the quantity and charging the same price, in the hope that the market doesn’t really notice (so your competitive state in the market doesn’t change much), is adversarial. I don’t know if that’s whats happening though. I’ve heard the term ‘shrinkflation’ recently which means responding to inflation with reduced quantities instead of increased prices. The idea there is to maintain the price. That seems adversarial. It sucks that businesses are put in that position by the government though (who, afaik, are the sole cause of inflation).
The cake mix change seems to have been adversarial. They seem to have put effort into hiding the fact that the recipe has changed. I think it’d be less adversarial to just raise the price of the cake mix. It could also have been incompetence/ignorance with regard to their own product.
So, arguably we have some adversarial behaviour in both cases. So two red flags.
I didn’t consider whether they also changed the dry ingredients recipe. Maybe the recipe was changed so that it was somehow equivalent to the previous, higher weight one? Or maybe it was just changed for other reasons, and it resulted in a lower weight? Don’t know.