Russia’s “borscht index,” a cost of living index comprised of the price of standard ingredients in the traditional borscht soup, has doubled in the last five years. At the same time, the average size of food packets on supermarket shelves is slowly decreasing.

In the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, inflation is soaring in Russia. It hit a six-year high of 8.39% in 2021. This is driving up the prices of staples in Russian shops.

The borscht index measures the price of the basic ingredients for the famous Eurasian delicacy borscht: cabbage, potato, beetroot, carrot and onion.

Ingredients for one portion of borscht now cost RUB233.19 ($3.06), compared with RUB111.19 ($1.46) in 2017.

Meanwhile, the net weight of the food in some packaged goods is decreasing, according to Kommersant. This practice, known as “shrinkflation”, is employed by producers who cannot afford to keep selling the same goods for the same prices.

Instead, the cost of inflation is shifted onto the consumer by keeping prices the same but subtly reducing the contents of the package. The thinking behind this is that shoppers are more likely to check the price tag than they are to check the net weight of the product, so won’t be deterred from buying the product.

The benchmark ingredients in the soup – the so-called “borscht set” – were set by a retired teacher Natalya Atuchina from Omsk, who invented the index in 2014 to track rising prices after the sanctions regime was first imposed on Russia.

Russians who lived through the hyperinflation of the early 1990s remain somewhat traumatised by the experience and inflation to this day remains one of the public’s biggest concerns. So pensioners spending their spare time inventing inflation tracking indicators is not as strange in Russia as it may sound.

Nestle has reduced the contents of one set of instant coffee packets from 95g to 85g, while the average weight of a stick of butter has fallen from 180g to 150g, and 0.43 litre cans of beer are replacing 0.5 litre cans as the standard.

According to NielsenIQ, more than 20% of “new positions” in the dairy sector are the result of decreasing packet sizes.

With Russian wage growth stagnant, and the threat of new sanctions over Putin’s recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent from Ukraine, it seems likely that Russia’s consumers will be more stretched than ever in the years to come.

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) anticipates that prices will grow by 5-6% in 2022, but that prediction fails to account for the impact of the escalating crisis with Ukraine.