The Dessert Aisle, 2018 vs. 2026: How 20 Desserts Changed Package Size and Serving Size

Ice cream got a bigger scoop on paper

The Nutrition Facts serving is not a portion someone chose for you. It comes from a federal table of "reference amounts customarily consumed," and every manufacturer in a category starts from the same number. Before the 2016 update, that table set ice cream, frozen yogurt and sherbet at 1/2 cup, and it gave frozen pops and ices their own reference amount of 85 grams, according to the April 2016 edition of 21 CFR 101.12.

The table in force today reads differently. The current reference-amount table places ice cream, frozen yogurt, sherbet, frozen pops and frozen fruit juices in one shared row at 2/3 cup, a figure that includes the volume of any coating or wafer. That is a 33 percent larger serving for a scoopable tub, and for a box of ice pops the jump can be much bigger, because a single pop that used to count as one serving is now well short of 2/3 cup.

It helps to hold on to what this number means. The FDA explains that the serving sizes on the label are not recommended serving sizes and that, by law, they have to reflect how much people actually eat rather than how much they should. So the bigger ice cream serving is a measuring convention, not a suggestion.

Why cookies, cakes and pudding stayed put

Outside the freezer, the reference amounts that matter for a dessert aisle did not move. Cookies stayed at 30 grams, brownies at 40 grams, and cakes at 125, 80 or 55 grams depending on how dense they are. Doughnuts, Danish, crumb cakes and sweet rolls stayed at 55 grams, pies and pastries at 125 grams, and custards, gelatin and pudding at 1/2 cup.

There is one nearby change worth knowing about, even though it sits just outside our set. Muffins and toaster pastries were split out of the 55-gram group and moved, alongside bagels, to 110 grams. If a breakfast pastry's serving seems to have doubled, that is the reason.

When the new labels had to appear

The final rule took effect in July 2016 and originally gave large manufacturers until July 26, 2018 to comply, with smaller makers given another year, as the Federal Register notice set out. Those deadlines were later pushed back to January 1, 2020 for companies with $10 million or more in annual food sales and January 1, 2021 for smaller ones.

That timing is what makes 2018 such a useful "before." The USDA archive we used was captured in July 2018, right at the original deadline and well ahead of the extended one, so most of the dessert labels in it still show the old serving sizes.

The rule that ties a barcode to the size

The obvious way to track a product over time is by its barcode, the 12- to 14-digit Global Trade Item Number printed under the stripes. It turns out that approach has a built-in blind spot. The standard that governs barcodes says that any change to the declared net content printed on a pack, up or down, requires a brand-new barcode.

In practice, that means a barcode is married to its size. If you find the same barcode in 2018 and in 2026, you should find the same net weight or volume too. A carton that shrank does not show up as a changed number under its old barcode; it shows up as a new barcode sitting next to it on the same product line.

We used that rule in two ways. First, because the 2018 archive records serving sizes but has no field for package weight at all, we took each 2018 barcode's package size from the same barcode's later records, which the barcode rule says should be identical. Second, to catch products that did get smaller, we looked for newer barcodes carrying the same brand, the same product description and a different package size.

What we pulled, and how we chose the 20

The "before" data is USDA's July 2018 Branded Food Products Database, which holds 239,089 product rows covering 236,694 barcodes, with serving sizes in grams and in household measures. The "after" data is the April 30, 2026 FoodData Central branded foods release, which keeps every historical version of each product, nearly two million records for 442,181 barcodes, and records package weights from 2021 onward.

Of the 2018 barcodes, 23,722 land in a dessert category in the 2026 release: ice cream and frozen novelties, cookies, snack cakes and pastries, and pudding and gelatin. We narrowed that to barcodes whose most recent label was updated in 2020 or later, lists a package weight, and is not marked discontinued. That left 8,100 eligible products, a 34 percent match rate.

From that pool we picked 20 national brands you would recognize, spread across the aisle, and set aside any product whose history was too tangled to read cleanly. Tillamook, for example, has both a 1.75-quart and a 1.5-quart vanilla bean carton appearing in 2023 records, so there is no clear before and after to report. A few Nabisco staples dropped out because their newest label in the database still dates from 2017 or 2018.

The before-and-after table

Servings per container below are calculated from the package size and the declared serving, so they may differ slightly from the rounded "about" figures printed on a carton. For ice cream, 1/2 cup is 118.3 milliliters and 2/3 cup is 157.7 milliliters.

What the counts add up to

Laid end to end, the table tells a calmer story than the one many of us carry around. Five of the 20 packages got smaller, and none got bigger. Eight declared servings got larger, every one of them in the freezer case. Nine products now declare fewer servings per container than they did in 2018, but only three of those nine actually lost contents; the other six hold exactly what they always did and simply measure a serving differently.

Nine of the 20 did not change at all. The Twinkies box, the crumb cake, the rice pudding tub and the Biscoff sleeve all carry the same net weight and the same serving they carried in 2018.

If you enjoy this kind of then-and-now comparison, our look at 1970s supermarket staples and their 2020s reformulations follows familiar products across a much longer stretch of time.

Two ice creams, two changes at once

The most confusing rows are the ones where both changes landed together. Turkey Hill's Original Vanilla carton moved from 48 to 46 fluid ounces, a 4 percent trim, on a new barcode that first appears in 2023. Over the same stretch, its serving moved from 66 grams to 87 grams because of the rule. The result is a label that dropped from about 12 servings to about 9, even though only a small part of that drop came from the carton itself.

Blue Bunny's Vanilla Bean pint shows the same pattern more sharply. The older barcode is a true 16-ounce pint; the newer one holds 14 fluid ounces, 12.5 percent less. Stack the 2/3-cup serving on top, and "servings per container" falls from 4 to about 2.6. Read on its own, that number would suggest the pint lost a third of its contents. It lost an eighth.

Cookies and snacks that slimmed down

Oreo's familiar 14.3-ounce package has a successor at 13.29 ounces, a 7 percent drop, on a barcode first seen in September 2023. The serving did not change at all: three cookies, 34 grams. Here the smaller servings-per-container figure is entirely about the package.

Two single-serve items tell a quieter version of the same story. Hostess Glazed Mini Donuts still come six to a pack, but the pack went from 105 grams to 85 grams on a newer barcode, so each little donut is lighter. Blue Bunny's strawberry fruit bar moved from 4 fluid ounces to 3.5. Because each of these is sold as a single serving, the label still says "1 serving," and the only place the change shows is the net weight.

Same carton, fewer servings

Six of our 20 products changed only because the reference amount changed. The three 1.5-quart cartons from Breyers and Dreyer's all hold what they held in 2018, yet each now lists 9 servings instead of 12, because each serving grew by about a third, from roughly 60 to 66 grams up to 82 to 88 grams. Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's pints show the same shift at a richer density, with servings climbing past 125 grams.

The Popsicle row is the most dramatic. In 2018, one Jolly Rancher ice pop was one serving at 49 grams. Once pops were folded into the 2/3-cup ice cream row, the serving became three pops at 148 grams, and the same 29.7-ounce box now declares one-third as many servings.

A pattern that holds across the whole aisle

Our 20 products are a sample, so we checked the wider pool too. Among 1,353 barcode-matched tubs and pints that declared a 1/2-cup serving in 2018 and have a newer label on file, 465 now show 2/3 cup. For those, the serving in grams rose by a median factor of 1.33, which is exactly 2/3 divided by 1/2. The rule is doing precisely what it says.

The rest of that pool still shows 1/2 cup in its latest database record, even some flavors from brands whose other flavors switched. That reflects how the database is filled, often from photographed labels that may show older packaging, rather than evidence that a company ignored the rule.

Outside the freezer, the serving on the label barely moved. Across every barcode-matched product with a newer label on file, the declared serving stayed within one gram of its 2018 value for 94.5 percent of cookies, 95.1 percent of cakes and snack cakes, and 98.6 percent of puddings. That lines up neatly with the rule, which left those reference amounts alone.

It is worth savoring that finding for a moment, because it runs against the feeling that everything in the aisle is quietly shrinking. Little Debbie Swiss Rolls still come in a 20.08-ounce family box with 95-gram servings. Snack Pack cups are still 92 grams each, four to a pack. The Klondike box still holds six 85-gram bars.

The labels on these familiar treats can also carry wording that sounds more meaningful than it is, which we unpack in our guide to the exaggerated claims food brands put on their labels.

Package and serving size are only part of the picture, so we added category-level prices for context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes national average prices for both a half gallon of regular bulk ice cream and a pound of chocolate chip cookies. In August 2018, the ice cream averaged $4.66 and the cookies $3.35. In August 2026, they averaged $5.85 and $5.21.

Adjusted for overall inflation using the Consumer Price Index, which rose by about 33 percent over the same period, those two paths split apart. Ice cream came out roughly 5 percent cheaper in real terms, while chocolate chip cookies came out about 17 percent more expensive.

Two cautions keep these numbers honest. They describe whole categories, not the specific cartons and packages in our table, so they cannot tell you whether any single product became a worse deal. And because BLS prices are expressed per half gallon or per pound, they already account for containers getting smaller.

For a longer view of how grocery prices have moved, our look at what $50 of groceries bought in 1995 compared with today fills in the decades before this one.

Here is the takeaway that holds up through both kinds of change. The rule changes how many grams count as a serving. A smaller package changes how many servings fit in the box. Neither one changes what is in each gram of the food. So when you want to compare two desserts, or the same dessert across the years, looking at the numbers per 100 grams takes both moving parts out of the equation.

USDA uses the same approach for its own branded-food records, converting each label's per-serving values into per-100-gram values so products can be compared on equal footing. Many shoppers do this with a phone calculator in the aisle: divide the label value by the serving's grams, then multiply by 100.

A second habit that can help is reading the net weight on the front of the package rather than the servings-per-container line. Net weight answers "how much am I getting," while servings per container mixes that answer with a measuring convention.

Labeling rules also explain why a single-serve pack can look unchanged on the Nutrition Facts panel even when it shrank. FDA guidance treats a package holding less than 200 percent of the reference amount as a single-serving container that must be labeled as one serving, so the mini donuts and fruit bars in our table say "1 serving" both before and after.

The same per-unit thinking powers our ranking of 20 cereals by fiber per dollar and sugar per bowl, if you want to see it applied to the breakfast aisle.

Every dataset has edges, and it is kinder to name them than to let them surprise you. The first is timing. The April 2026 release is new, but the label behind many "latest" entries was captured between 2021 and 2023, because USDA's branded database reflects what manufacturers and data partners have most recently submitted. A few products may have changed again since.

The second is that a change in the database is not always a change in the product. USDA notes that branded food downloads come from industry data providers and are refreshed every six months, and its documentation cautions that an updated value can reflect a corrected error rather than a reformulation. We only reported changes that line up with either the federal rule or a separate, newer barcode, which is the pattern a real package change leaves behind.

The third is scope. Twenty products is a snapshot, not a census, and we chose national brands so the table would be useful at your own store. Store brands, regional ice creams and bakery-counter desserts may tell a different story.

You can follow a similar database method in our count of new pumpkin spice products in the USDA database by year, which uses the same branded-food archive.