revived

Christmas has revived the specter of redflation and rising prices. And Suchard’s nougat is the bloodiest example

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There is still a month and a half until Christmas begins (unless you live in Vigo), but that has not prevented the shelves of supermarkets in half the country from starting to fill with boxes of Polvorones, panettonesalmonds, marzipan and (of course) nougat tablets. With them, however, something else has arrived: the shadow of the reduflationa phenomenon about which OCU and FACUA they have been for years warning and which basically consists of covering up price increases. You go home believing that you have paid the same (or a little more) than last year when in reality, if you do the math, the kg/€ ratio is much higher. It is not a new practice or exclusive to Christmas, but is already giving something to talk about on account of one of the classics of the national holidays: Suchard’s nougat. What has happened? that the platform Fitstore.es has done an interesting experiment that is generating intense debate. Basically, he has dedicated himself to analyzing the evolution of Suchard chocolate nougat bars between 2020 and 2025, which allowed him to detect two apparently opposing trends: we are paying much more money in exchange for much less product. To be more precise, FITstore ensures that the tablet has gone from costing €2.99 in 2020 to the current €4.99almost 70% more. On some websites, such as Alcampocan be found for less, but that (€4.99) is the sale price in chains like Carrefour, Day either Eroski. The striking thing is that tablets do not weigh the same today as they did five years ago, when they were cheaper. In fact they have decreased. Click on the image to go to the tweet. How have they decreased? According to the FITstore studioIn 2023, Suchard chocolate nougat bars went from weighing 260 grams to 230 g, 11.5% less. If you go to a supermarket (we have done the test in Vigo) that is probably the format you are going to find: 230 g tablets. It is not a phenomenon that only the online sales platform has detected. Last year already warned of this ‘bailing’ the Facua association, which explained that although the price of Suchard nougat had not increased (€3.99) the €/kg ratio had gone from 15.35 to 17.35. That is, (sneakily) the product became 13% more expensive. In some stores the tablet was even more expensive. In DAP They explained last year how Suchard nougat, which in 2023 cost €3.67 in Alcampo, had gone to €3.98. And this despite the fact that the product weighed 30 g less. Is it an isolated case? No. Or it wasn’t, at least a year ago, when Facua published an extensive report in which he cited more cases of reduflation between Christmas sweets. Specifically, it spoke of about a dozen articles that applied “significant price increases” taking advantage of a change in design. For example, Dulce Noel black crunchy nougat went from costing €1.85 in Dia stores in October 2023 to €1.99 a year later. An increase of 7.6% that actually hid an increase in prices of 43.4%. The reason? In addition to becoming 14 cents more expensive, the tablet had been reduced by 50 g, going from 200 to 150 g. More or less similar cases, with increases per kilo of up to 52%, could be found in other items from Nestlé, Lindt or the Dia white label. What is the reason for the increase? The million dollar question. The rise in prices of chocolates and nougat can be explained in part by manufacturing costs: in the last year they have become more expensive the energyrents and ingredients such as rice, flour and the eggs. However, if there is a product that has seen its price skyrocket with a key impact on the candy industry, it is chocolate, mired in an international crisis which has directly influenced its price. The CPI gives a good account of this. According to the last data published by the INE (corresponding to September), chocolate has skyrocketed by almost 16% during the last year. Cocoa has increased by 8.5%. These are high percentages, but they also show a relaxation compared to those recorded just a few months ago, when the year-on-year increase in chocolate exceeded 20%. The question remains to what extent cocoa fluctuations are now influencing nougat. What do they say from the sector? At Xataka we have contacted Mondelez International to ask them about the changes in Suchard nougats and, more specifically, about their apparent reduflation. The multinational does not go into details, but remembers that it operates “in an increasingly complex and unstable environment” that forces it to make “adjustments” so as not to “compromise the taste and quality” of the product. “As food manufacturers, we continue to face high costs throughout our supply chain, especially in key ingredients such as cocoa. This makes manufacturing our products significantly more expensive than in the past,” explains the company, which claims to do “everything possible to assume the extra costs.” “However, in such a complex environment, we sometimes have to make carefully considered adjustments to our Suchard range.” The goal, they say, is “to continue offering consumers the chocolate nougat they love, without compromising the great flavor or quality they expect.” “For this reason, and despite the context, we have not altered our recipe, again in order to protect the quality and taste of this iconic Christmas product.” Images | Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash) and Xataka In Xataka | I have made homemade nougat and it is delicious. The problem is the price

The earthquake has revived the fear of a new Fukushima. This time, nuclear power plants are armed to teeth

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The red tsunami alert issued on the coast of Japan after a strong earthquake in Russia has served as a raw reminder of the 2011 disaster. Japanese televisions cut their usual programming to show an unequivocal order in capital letters: “Tsunami! Evacuate!“The message, shouted in unison by the presenters, resonated with those of 14 years ago. But this time, the nuclear power plants were much better prepared. Context. For millions of Japanese, The scene that was lived this Wednesday It was too familiar. The collective memory immediately returned to March 11, 2011, when an earthquake of magnitude 9 unleashed a tsunami that not only charged about 20,000 lives, but caused the worst nuclear accident of the 21st century in the Fukushima central. Yesterday, the workers of the own Fukushima plant They suspended their tasks and evacuated the nuclear power plant towards higher land, knowing that nuclear safety has suffered a radical transformation. The global nuclear industry not only learned Fukushima’s lessons: it made them concrete, steel and new protocols on an unprecedented scale. The turning point. To understand the magnitude of the changes, we must remember what exactly failed in Fukushima-Daiichi. The disaster It was not caused directly by the earthquakebut for the tsunami that followed. Waves of up to 15 meters far exceeded the containment wall of the plant, flooding the emergency diesel generators and cutting all the plant power of the plant. Without capacity to refrigerate reactors, Three of the nuclei merged. The lesson was brutal: the security margins, designed for probable events, were insufficient before an extreme event. Fukushima was a global attention call that unleashed a regulatory and technical revolution. The paradigm shift is summarized in moving from a probabilist approach (designing for what is expected) to a total resilience (being ready for the unexpected). Not only in Japan. Immediately after the accident, regulators around the world launched A thorough review of its facilities, creating international frames to ensure that the lessons learned will be applied everywhere. China and the United States They promoted strategies so that all nuclear power plants can support an indefinite loss of energy. In Europe, all plants passed Stress tests against earthquakes, floods and total loss of security systems, forcing each country to implement a national action plan in case of finding defects. Gravelines, the largest nuclear power plant in France, reinforced his dike and added new gates Mobile Concrete and steel. Japanese centrals have been working like none, investing billions of dollars. They sealed all possible water input routes with stagnant doors, installed high capacity Achique pumps and built higher walls. Onagawa, the central closest to the 2011 epicenter, survived thanks to its 14 -meter wall. After Fukushima’s accident, the Tohoku Electric Power energy company did not walk with little girls and built A new 2 meter high dikealmost like a 10 -story building. Hamooka raised his breakwater 22 meters above sea leveland relocated the emergency diesel generators in a hill at 25 meters high. Tokai-2 raised A slope 1.7 kilometers longprepared to resist a wave of 17.1 meters. The reactors of the future. These lessons have also moved to the new designs of third and fourth generation reactors, including compact modular reactors (SMR), which incorporate them as standard. The AP1000 and its Chinese CAP-1000 derivative They can keep safe for 72 hours without any human intervention or external energy thanks to passive cooling systems that work by gravity and convection. The European EPR-2 includes double containment, a filtered vent system and A “Core-Catcher” Designed to contain the molten nucleus in the hypothetical case of an accident. And the Nuscale or the BWRX-300 of Gen-Hitachi can be installed as underground reactors, which makes them intrinsically immune to tsunamis and other surface disasters. A safer world. Wednesday’s Tsunami alert is a reminder that we are still at the mercy of nature. But also an opportunity to verify that, in the 14 years that have passed since Fukushima, the defenses of nuclear power plants have become a real fortress. The 2011 disaster was not in vain. Image | IAEA In Xataka | People did not take the drills seriously, so Japan found something much more effective: video game drills

‘The island of temptations’ had been without great successes for years, but it has revived thanks to an unusual memes reef: Montoya

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‘La Revuelta’, in La1, coincides a couple of days a week with ‘The island of temptations’, the tronado reality of TV5 of couples who undergo high pressure tests to demonstrate their love. On January 29, Broncano and her guest, singer NIA, chatted for a while of the abundant plots that the Mediaset program has generated: that is the level of the eighth edition of the program, commented to In its direct competition. Or as with Retraca they recognized in one of the subtitles of the program, “the debate of ‘The island of temptations’ is in La1. TV in Spain is more complex than Marvel Multiverse” Ascent audiences. The audiences with which this edition of ‘The island of temptations’ started They were not especially high. Although it is still to see the average audience of the season, which currently is around 15.4% of Share (something less than last year), in recent weeks its audiences are exceeding 16%, as its content is viralized in networks: its maximum was obtained this last Monday, with a remarkable 18.5%. In any case, it remains far from those stratospheric audiences of 24.1%, 22.5% and 26.3% of the first three editions. What makes this edition different? Without a doubt, their contestants, who have managed to generate viral content without a price. Let’s briefly remember the rules of the contest. A series of couples come to an island, where they separate in two large groups: boys and girls will be tempted in their respective residences, and their partners will later see the images of nonsense, erotic games, dances and falls in plate in temptation. Of course, the more exaggerated the reactions of their partners seeing them “sin”, the more television it results. And thus, the Sevillian Jose Carlos Montoya has become a living meme with his exorbitant reactions to the behavior of his girlfriend Anita. What Montoya has done now. In these weeks that the eighth edition of the program has been running, there have already been criticism for the High level of toxicity of one of the couplesbut Montoya like for that imposed drama, almost an involuntary parody of the Latin character. That personality of an advertisement of colony that has led to Open several shirts to pull As a gesture of spite, literalizing so many couplets about misfortunes, passionate (not knowing that “breaks the shirt” is sometimes also a metaphor); to run aimlessly and finally collapse in the sand of the beach between shoutsas in a karaoke video; And as a great final number, break into the house of the brides to catch her In fraganti in bed, crazy whose conclusion will be seen on the night of February 5. A meme that crosses borders. Montoya’s clear precedent on the island are contestants from other editions that ranged from the cartoon jealousy (“Manué, La Manita Relajá“) or the passions that spread much further further and their weak human wrappings (that cristofer scream”Estefaníaaaaa! “In the first season and that closes the circle with the escape of Montoy Trochants Memesnext to threads that review their life out of the island and inside. But Montoya also transcended borders: It is not necessary to understand Spanish to alone in your body expressiveness of MUPPET in love. A dead end. Montoya is the perfect example of all the needs, attractions and problems of the program: it is very hilarious to contemplate its naked behavior, but we all know that it is creating show. There is an abyss between Montoya and the Primal “Who puts my leg on me“From the first edition of ‘Big Brother’, disarming in its naive ‘Blind trust’ that was crowned as the best reality Spanish of all time. Here we all know the rules of the game, and that makes it more wild, but in essence, much less human. Header | Mediaset In Xataka | Japan had a real “Truman show”. And it was starred by a man locked up, naked and forced to survive with coupons

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