[nazgulnarsil]

it's partially driven by scale. Take a good product and have it get accolades on the review sites and on reddit. The flood of sales triggers the manufacturer to find ways to cut costs. Saving ten cents doesn't matter when you sell ten thousand of something. But when you sell ten million, well you can hire people whose whole job it is to find ten cent cuts. Each cut itself isn't really noticeable, but eventually they add up. I learned about this from running a food company. Our competitors make their protein bars for, I'm told by a long time industry insider, 17 cents in ingredients.