Tide Drops Ounces, But Number of Loads and the Dosing Caps Remain Unchanged

Tide has once again downsized some its bottles of detergent. The venerable 100-ounce bottle of original Tide that was reduced to 92 ounces in 2014, and then to 84 ounces last year, now has just gone down again to 80 oz.

*MOUSE PRINT:

But miracles of miracles, it still provides enough detergent for 64 laundry loads, they say. Some water was probably removed.

We also discovered last week that the dosing cap fill lines seem to have remained the same on both the new and old bottles.

MrConsumer immediately thought “those sneaks” at P&G are tricking people into using more detergent than is necessary given the new formulation which should allow you to use less. One of our readers, Mitch M., also discovered the cap issue, but figured out what the company actually did.

In the tiniest type on the back label of the bottles, enlarged below, P&G changed the dosing instructions.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Rather than redesign a new cap, they just changed those unreadable instructions to use a certain amount less than the actual lines on the bottle. The old bottle, for example, said for medium and large loads to fill the cap to just below the line, and the new bottle says to fill it 80-percent of the way up the line. Amazingly, both the old and the new bottles had inaccurate fill lines on them.

How crazy is that? So we asked P&G why they didn’t update the cap with accurate fill lines each time they downsized Tide. The company did not respond.