It started with bigger gaps between Toblerone’s chunky chocolate peaks, but now the Maltesers have started to disappear too.

Food manufacturing giant Mars has shrunk its sharing bags of Maltesers by 15% as it looks for ways to offset rising production costs. It is the latest example of what is being described as “shrinkflation” in the food industry, where packs get smaller but consumers still pay the same price.

Mars’ shift to a smaller pack size was picked up by Steve Dresser, author of industry blog Grocery Insight, who found 103g packs of Maltesers on a supermarket shelf where the old shelf-edge ticket clearly showed the previous 121g pack size. He also pointed out that Mars had shrunk packs of its Galaxy Counters too.

A spokesman for Mars said: “Like all chocolate manufacturers, we have seen the cost of raw materials rise and, while we try to absorb these pressures as much as possible, sometimes we have to make the difficult decision to reduce the size of some of our products so our consumers can continue to enjoy an affordable treat.”

“Shrinkflation” first surfaced during the last recession and in recent years chocolate lovers have been increasingly shortchanged: Mars and Snickers bars have got smaller; a 1kg Quality Street tin has slimmed down to 820g and a six-pack of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs has been whittled down to five.

This year manufacturers have faced fresh pressure with the cost of producing milk chocolate estimated to have risen 40% due to sharp increases in the price of sugar and whole milk powder.

Toblerone maker Mondelez, which also owns Cadbury, also blamed higher ingredient costs for cutting the weight of two bars from Toblerone’s UK range. It has reduced 400g bars to 360g and 170g bars to 150g to keep retail prices steady.