Same Bottle, Lower Proof: How “Rum” Quietly Stopped Being Rum

Shrinkflation isn’t just smaller packets. Look closer at the label — the ABV, the ingredients list — and the same instinct is reshaping products that look completely unchanged.

Pick up a spiced rum you’ve been drinking for a decade and read the small print. There’s a decent chance the word “rum” isn’t on it anymore. Not because the bottle changed — because the recipe drifted below the line that legally defines the drink. Four in five UK adults now say they’re concerned about shrinkflation, up from three in four just a couple of years ago. Most of that concern targets smaller cereal boxes and thinner chocolate bars. Fewer people check the number printed in tiny type on a spirit label, or the order of ingredients on a wrapper. That’s exactly where the same instinct is playing out.

The 37.5% Line

Start with rum. EU and UK spirits regulation sets a hard floor: 37.5% ABV. Below that, the law says it isn’t rum. Several of the biggest spiced rum brands on supermarket shelves now sit at 35%, some at 30%. That isn’t a style choice — it’s below the legal floor. So the small print quietly changes to “spirit drink” or “rum-based spirit drink.” The bottle, the branding and the price stay exactly where they were.

Why would a distiller deliberately step below the threshold that defines the product it’s famous for? The UK’s August 2023 alcohol duty reform is most of the answer. The UK now charges spirits duty per litre of pure alcohol in the bottle, not per bottle — so the higher the strength, the higher the tax. On a standard 70cl bottle, dropping from 42% to 35% ABV cuts the duty bill by roughly £1.70, from the strength change alone. That’s before counting the extra saving on the base spirit itself needed to fill the bottle. Multiply that across the tens of millions of bottles a major brand moves a year. A couple of points of ABV stops being a rounding error and starts being a real budget line.

Chocolate’s Version of the Same Trick

Chocolate is running a version of the same play through the ingredients list instead of the strength. World cocoa prices went from around $2,400 a tonne in 2022 to a near-50-year high above $10,000 in early 2025. Poor harvests hit Ghana and Ivory Coast — the two countries that between them grow roughly six in ten of the world’s cocoa beans. Faced with that, several major confectionery groups have quietly swapped cocoa butter for palm oil, shea oil and other vegetable fats.

UK and EU rules set a minimum cocoa content before a product can legally call itself “chocolate” — as low as 20% cocoa solids for UK milk chocolate. Push below that line and, legally, it stops being chocolate. Some familiar biscuits have already dropped the word from their own packaging and now call themselves simply “chocolate-flavoured.”

Full Strength, By Choice

None of this is hidden, exactly — it’s all sitting in the small print, which is precisely why it works. That’s the bet we’ve made the opposite way with Magna Carta Rum. We bottle it at 42% ABV, comfortably above the legal rum floor. We build it on real Dominican Republic rum and infuse it with whole cinnamon, ginger, lime peel, tonka bean, grains of paradise, vanilla, allspice and cloves — not flavouring shortcuts. It costs more to make. It costs more to buy, at full duty. But it’s still the product the label says it is, and it picked up an IWSC Silver Medal for it.

There’s also a genuine quality case for a higher ABV that has nothing to do with getting drunk faster. Alcohol is a far better solvent than water for the aromatic, oil-based compounds in spices, citrus peel and botanicals. That’s why a spiced rum sitting at 40–42% pulls noticeably more flavour out of its cinnamon, ginger and clove infusion than the same recipe cut back to 35%. Strength also matters once a mixer gets added: a spirit you dilute yourself, at the glass, with ice and ginger ale, still has flavour in reserve to lose. A spirit the distillery already watered down doesn’t.

People usually frame shrinkflation as a shelf-size story — and it is one. By weight, some UK biscuit packets have shrunk by close to 28% over the past decade while the price held steady or rose. But the same pressure is now working on products that look completely unchanged on the shelf: identical bottle, identical wrapper, identical price, different contents. Pack size is the easy thing to notice. ABV percentages and ingredient lists, however, take a bit more reading — but that’s where the real story usually is.