OK, I got a reply from Birds Eye today:
Justifiable? Baloney? Judge for yourself.
Seconded. We buy the bags of frozen veggies - a pound of them provides a nice big serving for each of the 4 of us - and we alternate between the regular peas and the “petite” peas. The petite ones are a little sweeter and more tender. I don’t recall what the price difference is (and it’s store brand anyway) but I don’t think it’s quite that big.
Not sure if it’s a different strain, or simply ones that are picked earlier, or even simply ones that were filtered out from the larger ones.
In general (I can’t speak to the peas, directly, because dammit I think peas are the food of the Devil) the smaller a vegetable is, the more flavorful it will be and the better quality. Compared to growing a crop for weight or volume, the producer generally gets less product per acreage when specializing in so-called baby vegetables, and so to remain competitive with the more common larger bulk items they charge more.
I don’t know that this, and the difference in tooling costs mentioned up thread are sufficient to justify the magnitude of the price differential you’ve quoted. But it’s not an automatic fail for me, either.
Short answer, to my mind, is to go with the double blind taste test, and see which you prefer, or if the difference in taste justifies the difference in cost.
Yields will be lower if the peas are harvested smaller, so there’s certainly a higher cost there.
Whether it’s enough to justify the difference at point of sale, I dunno - but a lot of that is going to be down to the perceived value of the product - I mean, the OP is complaining that they’re too expensive - that proves there’s a demand for them, doesn’t it?
FTR, I prefer the smaller, sweeter “early” peas, too.
Are these petit peas? I have seen recipes specifically suggest them.
This reminds me of the story of the shrinking Hershey bar-- they so desired to maintain a retail price of a dime for the bar that the bar kept shrinking over the years as costs escalated, to the point that the “bar” became something like a chocolate credit card. Eventually, they discarded the “keep the price the same” ploy and brought the bar back up to snuff.
I do think Duckster has a point with how many companies handle this downsizing, though. It seems often that products that are downsized are proclaimed as “New! Improved!” or whatever will make the customer ignore the fact that the product didn’t necessarily change for the better.
As for bulk not always being a better deal, as noted by Duckster. That’s not really a new thing, and odd pricing that makes economy sizes uneconomical are a side-effect of chains that tweak profit levels on individual items to get the best combination of profit and sales. If a big box retailer regularly sells more of a smaller size package, they can get volume discounts that reduce the unit price significantly, which can bring smaller package sizes down in cost to the point that it’s more economical to buy them 5 at a time instead of getting the big 5x size. (Thus perpetuating the sales discrepancy between sizes…)
I got a follow-up message from Fresh Direct on the price differential, to go along with the response from Birds Eye about the product difference:
So the “regular” peas are being discounted from MSRP by Fresh Direct more so than the “tiny tender peas”.