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The story
Culinary researcher Ryuji commented on a change to the content volume of Nippon Ham’s popular sausage “Schauessen,” sparking discussion on 5ch. The official Schauessen account cited soaring raw material costs and supply instability as reasons for reducing the number of sausages per pack, while touting an increase in per-piece weight as a “boost in meatiness.” On the thread, reactions split between viewing this as a “de facto price hike” and praising the company’s approach. Many posters also weighed in with comparisons to rival brand “Kaoru” and their own theories on the relationship between price hikes and quality/quantity.
Mon, Oct 5, 3:09 PM
Culinary researcher Ryuji (40) updated his official X (formerly Twitter) account by the 5th, commenting on the de facto price increase of a popular product.
That day, the official X account for Nippon Ham’s coarse-ground wiener sausage “Schauessen” announced that it would be cutting the content volume due to soaring raw material costs and unstable supply. “But we didn’t want to just cut back,” the account told users. “So we increased the weight per sausage and boosted the meaty texture.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Honestly, Kaoru is way tastier.
The amount of meat juice is totally different.
If more people caught on, it'd probably knock Schauessen off the top spot.
Kaoru goes on sale at my local supermarket sometimes, great bang for your buck.
I bet a ton of people polish off a whole bag or two solo though.
Why was that exact weight chosen in the first place?
There must have been careful, deliberate reasoning behind it.
Companies should really think hard about whether changing that just "to keep the retail price down" is actually the right call.
We go with Kaoru at our place though.
No wonder Japan ends up the lone loser, turning into a "cheap country."
That's because wages barely budge here, to an extreme degree.
Folks born in the Heisei era (1989–2019) never lived through inflation, after all.
Nice pork bits, lol.
No matter how cheap the others are, I'm still eating Schauessen.
Isn't that just because it's cheap?
That's true.
I try to avoid sausages and ham as much as I can.
The salt content is pretty intense, but yeah, it's tasty.
Can't be helped, poor people have genuinely multiplied.
Smaller size: eh, borderline.
Tastes worse: no way.
Any company that does that last one, I'm never buying from again.
Price goes up, size goes down, and it tastes worse — that's basically the standard combo these days.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
“Soaring raw material costs and unstable supply” is an issue facing the food industry at large — price hikes have been hitting everything from Schauessen to potato chips. What split opinion on the thread boiled down to one question: whether to credit the company for offsetting the cut with a heavier per-piece weight, or to see the reduced piece count as a de facto price hike regardless. Another notable feature was the repeated comparison to rival brand “Kaoru,” which drew concentrated attention as a competitor known for its balance of price and satisfaction. Meanwhile, the only thing quoted in the original article is Nippon Ham’s own announcement — the text never actually shows what “true feelings” Ryuji himself expressed. Readers should be careful not to jump to conclusions about the content based on the word “true feelings” in the headline alone.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Ryuji] ‘Schauessen is apparently getting flamed online’ — his true feelings on the ‘reduced content, effectively a price hike’ thread link.”
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